Postbox Acquired by eM Client, Ends Development
Sad news. The longstanding email client Postbox has been sold to and shut down by eM Client, described by the announcement as “a leading email platform for Windows and macOS that combines email, calendars, tasks, contacts, notes, and chat into a single, easy-to-use application.”
Postbox users can continue to use the app indefinitely, but it will no longer be sold or developed. The company will continue to provide support through 22 December 2024, and the Postbox Help Center will remain available for another year, through 22 December 2025.
To ease the transition, the company is offering a 50% discount on a one-time purchase or the first year of an eM Client subscription for all users. Those who purchased Postbox after 22 September 2024 are eligible for a 100% discount, with these offers valid until 31 December 2024.
Built on Mozilla’s open-source Thunderbird, Postbox distinguished itself with powerful email management, advanced composition tools, and a customizable interface, attracting a niche yet loyal user base over 16 years. We first covered Postbox in the TidBITS Watchlist in 2010 (see “Postbox 2,” 1 October 2010). However, it hasn’t seen a significant update for 5 years (see “Postbox 7.0,” 9 September 2019). Although it has long been a serious contender among Mac email clients and TidBITS reader Patrick Dunn was telling me about its latest changes as recently as last month, I never found Postbox compelling.
On the other side of the equation, I’ve never heard of any Mac users relying on eM Client, despite its cross-platform status. I was going to say that I’d never heard of it at all, but searching my email reveals that I tested it briefly in February 2022. I suspect it’s a Windows app that has been clumsily ported to macOS. (Ironically, I was just encouraged by a PR person to look at Mailbird, another Windows email client that just released a version that runs on the Mac but bears little resemblance to a true Mac app.) eM Client gained iOS and Android clients only this year.
Competing in the email client world is tough, given that Apple’s bundled Mail is a solid app and Microsoft Outlook is free for Mac users. I suspect there’s room for small, focused companies to carve out niche markets, but generating the sales needed to support a larger staff is likely challenging. The Gmail-specific Mimestream—supported by a several-person company—is still my current client of choice (see “Why I Use Mimestream for Gmail,” 24 May 2023).
Postbox users, although there’s no need to decide immediately, where are you looking to migrate your email? Along with the company’s encouragement to move to eM Client, Thunderbird would seem to be an obvious choice, or you could jump to Mail, Outlook, or another app.
I’m still waiting to see what https://smallcubed.com is up to with https://mailmaven.app . Was it over a year ago they talked about having a Mac Mail Client after Apple killed their extension business? (I miss the macro keystrokes to port email into specific folders a lot and have paid a subscription fee solely so they can work on it).
Mac Mail has a lot of strengths but its falling behind a lot compared to gmail and outlook.
What a sad end of an app.
I have downloaded em Client some time ago but totally forgot about it. The feature comparison for the different versions is longer than my arm. And - of course - em Client doesn’t have any substantial AppleScript support.
I joined the MailMaven beta a year ago. There hasn’t been any progress.
I liked Postbox quite a bit but there were a few things I was missing so I switched back to Mail with the msg filer add-on. Recently I discovered Mailmate and it does pretty much everything I want and the search is really fast. It’s just one guy working on it so it could probably go at any time but it’s working great for me now.
I used eM Client for about 6 months earlier this year but switched back to my preferred email client MailMate a couple of months ago. eM Client has some nice features but lacks others, notably in my case SpamSieve integration. I’ve been very happy with MailMate.
Oh no! I’ve been using Postbox since I was asked to review it by a magazine years ago. It was so good, I paid for a license and have upgraded ever since. While wonky at times, it really fit the way I worked and use email.
I suspect I’ll migrate to the Mail app, but it’s an opportunity to try out others. I used Mailsmith well past its expiration date and then wrote some code to export its mostly mbox-compatible mailboxes to Postbox. I require mail software that is superb at searching.
@ace You’re spot on about a Windows app ported half-assed to the Mac. I keep trying even numbered versions and they still suck.
@pkg & @beatrixwillius As for MailMaven, I’m using it as my primary tool at the moment. Still a work in progress, but they are making progress.
sigh I miss Eudora!!!
I switched from Apple Mail to Postbox a few years ago because Mail was acting flaky (I can’t recall how offhand) and had smarter smart mailboxes, and other reasons I can’t remember.
I avoid anything that’s subscription, Google or Microsoft, so the alternatives seem limited. I guess I’ll hang on to Postbox while I can.
Oh well…
If Postbox is Thunderbird with added features, perhaps there is a Thunderbird add-on (or collection of add-ons) that can provide most of its features?
Wow, I was afraid this day would come. I’ve been using Postbox for well over a decade, since switching from Eudora, I think. I think it’s awesome… I’ll give Em Client a try, but maybe I’ll just switch to Mac Mail. I’ll certainly be following this thread to see what people think.
(Cue gnashing of teeth sound) - Why do the good apps I use seem to invariably go away??
Obviously Postbox will work for a while, but the writing is on the wall and I’ve started shopping for the replacement. In a day of looking though, I haven’t found anything that suits me exactly. I’ve taken quick looks at MailMate, MimeStream, Thunderbird, Apple Mail (again) for starters.
What I like in Postbox is readability of the window. Mailboxes down the left. Then a pane with columns for Flag/Topic/Subject/From/Recipient/Attachments/Date. With a quick scan I can see a lot of data at once.
I particularly like Postbox’s use of Topics which assign a text category to a message AND change the color of the whole line. I use RED for messages that need action, BLUE for messages in progress, GREEN for non-profits I deal with, etc. It’s not just a small colored flag, but it changes the text of the whole line to a color. It makes it very easy to see messages that need attention and those that don’t.
I also appreciate having separate columns for FROM and SUBJECT. It again makes it easier to scan quickly.
MailMate comes closes, but doesn’t seem to have the color coding option. And it just seems more crowded and hard to read to my eye.
Mimestream seems well crafted and responsive, but I really don’t like seeing the message FROM stacked on top of the SUBJECT; hard to read quickly. And ideally it would have IMAP support to so I could easily check my iCloud account. But I can live without that for in Mimestream for now too if I have to.
Bonus to Postbox also for having an RSS Reader option too, but I can find this elsewhere I guess.
The color coding of a whole line with some sort of tag and the grid layout of Subject/From/Date are really what I’m looking for. If anyone has more suggestions, post 'em here, please.
I am still surprised by the loyalty to Postbox: it’s not a “native” (Cocoa/AppKit) app, either. Maybe more important to someone like me, because accessibility. I tried EmClient, and it looked promising but was, itself, not quite accessible.
So MailMate’s where it’s at. That, and Apple Mail. I wish MailMate would read mail from the local filesystem—it’s IMAP-only—but that’s a small price to pay for what’s otherwise an excellent and super-powerful mailer. Long may it continue. Apple Mail just slides further and further into mediocrity, but local folders, rules and POP make it a good all-purpose default app that I can use on my spam filter drone machine.
I, too, switched to Postbox from Eudora. I rely heavily on Postbox’s middle column, where I can click on a favorite contact, a tag I’ve applied, or an attribute to see only certain emails. I also heavily use its filters to apply tags, which, because it’s whole colored line, enables me to quickly see emails from clients, family members, etc. It also enables me to quickly see all the emails related to a specific project, even when the participants are in different organizations. I’m going to miss all of this.
I use Spark on my Android phone and iPad. It’s got great features for dealing with emails that need to leave your email system, but not all the other features. Since I have a Setapp subscription, I’m going to test Spark and Canary Mail, which are the two included email apps.
But I’m really sad.
. And email is too important to continue using something that isn’t supported after December.
I still run Mailsmith on a legacy machine/macOS. Postbox came close enough that I bought a license but could never fully commit to using on a regular basis.
So the problem with using 3rd party email continues. They work well until they don’t.
I am not a Postbox user, but some of the things folks mention, like being able to collect mail on an ad hoc basis meeting a set of criteria, can be achieved by using a set of rules to create a Smart Mailbox in Apple Mail or other apps with similar features. If you reference those criteria often, name the smart mailbox; otherwise, delete it when you are done to reduce clutter.
You can use the same technique for photos (Smart Albums), music (Smart Playlists), and files (Smart Folders). One of the significant failings of mobile OSs is the lack of this capability.
Some of these Mail programs sound really great. I have only used Apple’s Mail and am always baffled by the structure. If I want to search in a particular folder, I search, and it searches all mailboxes, then I have to go to the folder and search again. I would love color coding and other ways to cull down my inbox. Maybe their AI implementation will help, but I doubt it.
Just to note that if this is something that can be automated, you can use a rule to color code messages. For example, if you want every message from your wife to be red, you can create a rule to do just that.
Settings, Rules tab. Add a rule. Set the condition (e.g., “From”, “contains”, whatever condition text that you want.) Under “Perform the following actions”, choose “Set color”, choose whether you want background or foreground color, which color you want, and that should do it. When you save the rule it will even offer to run the rule against your stored messages.
Ugh. I settled on Postbox as a replacement for Powermail, because it seemed stable and based on a common enough format that it should be easy to import and export to other clients.
I’ve got a corpus of 25+ years of email messages in my PowerMail archive (which is still being used on my iMac server that runs High Sierra), and my original plan was to export from PowerMail to Postbox. PowerMail’s search feature is lightning fast and perfectly accurate, but once I started accumulating emails in Postbox I found its search features were pretty terrible - I regularly get no hits on a search term, even though I have an email with that search term open at that very moment. So I wound up exporting my PowerMail corpus to Michael Tsai’s EagleFiler, and exporting the new emails in Postbox into that same EagleFiler archive on an annual basis. Unlike Postbox, EagleFiler’s searches are fast and accurate, although it can mangle formatting a little.
If anyone has suggestions for email clients with fast and accurate searches, and the ability to export to EagleFiler, I’m all ears.
About a year or so ago, I switched from Apple Mail to Gmail by adding my email account to it. I primarily use Gmail for two reasons; numerous add-ons and extensions are available, and I can read my email on (almost) any browser.
Gmail’s certainly one of the more convenient and cheapest email providers available. But it’s not an email client, which is what Postbox is. As a provider, most email providers have a web interface, so that’s not really an advantage for Gmail, and for some of us the fact that Google reads all your email for commercial purposes rules it out as a provider.
To all the people interested in color coding messages, I’ve just figured out that MailMate will let you add color to the message listing lines. I may have found my replacement for Postbox!
It’s not simple and takes a little technical know-how. But you can find more details here:
https://manual.mailmate-app.com/hidden_preferences
There’s a long discussion on the website here, stretching back over a decade.
https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672-mailmate/tickets/204
You’re doing too much work. When you initially search, it will show the results for the mailbox you are currently in, but also have an ‘All Mailboxes’ at the top of the sidebar and at the beginning of the Favorites Bar (if you show that). You can now select All or any mailbox in the sidebar to see the results for that mailbox.
eM Client is Mono-based (read: .Net Framework ported to other operating systems), so it isn’t a first-class Mac Citizen. Their new mobile app won’t fetch email in the background, only when you open it up.
I’ve got a lifetime Pro license since 2015, but a 13" screen is too small to use it.
@Shamino you’d have to find an add-on that removes calendar, tasks, chat. If you find that, let me know!
I also used Eudora!!!.. and Postbox mainly for my Gmail email address, one of the advantages for me was its integration with Spamsieve… plan to stop using it. I also use Airmail that is subscription based and do have Mac and iOS clients plus Spamsieve integration. I tried Thunderbird, is free, similar to Postbox but no Spamsieve integration. I tried Mimestream and liked it, but for the annual price I also expect an iOS client, they were working on it, maybe when they have it ready I will check again and ask for the Spamsieve integration too. I will keep using just Airmail and Apple Mail for now. Just my 0.02.
When Eudora finally started crashing, I decided to bail to AppleMail because I didn’t want to go through that again, don’t like to rely on a webmail interface, and don’t want to share all my email with Google. I have a handful of Gmail accounts for various purposes, and have them problematic at times. Their default of sorting incoming into categories that are separate from the InBox burned me a couple of times badly when I inherited the Gmail account of a group I belong to and missed overdue bills because Gmail put bills into Promotions.
Well, Gmail is both. When you read email in Gmail on the Web, you’re using the Gmail Web client. Gmail also has an iOS client, and there are Gmail-specific clients like Mimestream available for the Mac as well.
Google hasn’t served targeted ads based on content in Gmail since 2017.
Google does use Gmail content to power things like smart inbox categories, Smart Compose, and spam detection.
VERY sad news, indeed. I’ve always preferred an email client with a simplified and easy to use interface – Eudora, then Powermail, now Postbox. I suppose I’ll look at Spark since that’s what I used on the iPhone and iPad, but I fear going down another road that will trip me up.
I suppose I should take another look at Apple Mail, which I’ve never liked. Thunderbird just seems to flashy and clunky to me. Add this to the graveyard of my favorite browser of all time (Chimera/Camino) and any of the numerous other programs that have gone by the wayside – or demanded monthly payments to use.
I’ve gotten used to Thunderbird over time, but I can understand not liking its interface. On the other hand, with FLOSS software you don’t have to worry about it “go[ing] by the wayside – or demand[ing] monthly payments to use.” I’ve had the rug pulled out by too many proprietary products. With open source, if a program is popular somebody will maintain it. If the dev team decides to start charging for it, someone will fork it and maintain its free+open source status. To me, that’s an essential feature in any mission-critical software such as my email client.
And thus part of the problem – it has to be popular first. I was willing to pay for Postbox (and Powermail before it) because it suited me. It was worth the investment.
I suppose before the discount period ends I should look at EM Client and some of the others, but the good news is it’s a “lifetime” license so it’s not like it will quit working. And I don’t care if it’s Silicon native; if it runs it works – besides, I’m still using an Intel iMac and Macbook Pro …
I’ve used Postbox since 2011. Frustrating to see it go. Tried EM Client, but it’s a no-go - I couldn’t do something as basic as configure the columns in the main window to be the same as Postbox, because some fields I find helpful (size, recipient, account) aren’t available. Also, EM Client lacks what Thunderbird calls “table” view (as opposed to “card” view), which shows more messages.
I’m trying Thunderbird, but having some odd issues.
I can probably make Apple Mail work, but the bold vs regular text is too contrast-y, and I’ll miss Postbox’s attachments view (Mail for mac includes a Smart Mailbox “with attachments”, but that’s not as good).
Also: I have years of POP mail in Postbox that I’d like to be able to access going forward. When I looked into that in the past, the archiving solutions I found were complex and seemed geared towards IT pros. Can anyone recommend resources for beginners?
I’m using EagleFiler for just that purpose. Instructions for importing from PostBox are here:
EagleFiler Manual: 3.6.12 Importing Mail from Postbox
I’m going to give a +1 vote for MailMate as a replacement for Postbox. I’ve been playing with it for the past week, and find a lot to like. It can be configured to function and look very similar to Postbox.
Admittedly its user interface is a bit more fiddly and you have to be willing to get under the hood a bit. But if you do that, it has a great deal of power and customizability. Be aware, there are a number of hidden preferences that allow for the increased control. You will probably need to do a least a little bit of work in Terminal, and be prepared for some searching in the MailMate website service tickets area.
Documentation is generally good, though sometimes it assumes you know things you may or may not actually know. Reportedly the developer responds to queries though.
Probably good for the very casual user who’s happy with it as is and the power user who’s willing to delve into the depths of the settings. For those with very specific needs but who aren’t comfortable digging around in the innards, it may not be as ideal. But everyone’s use case is different so your mileage will vary of course. So far everything I’ve wanted it to do has been possible.
Still running both in parallel for a while longer but I anticipate buying Mailmate and making the switch in the coming month.
Oh, and I wrote a grumpy email to eM Client complaining about them taking over a working product and shutting it down and then trying to foist their own completely different email client on the user base. And that just on principal I wasn’t going to use their client.
I actually got an equivocating response from someone who apologized and said it wasn’t their idea to buy Postbox, but rather Postbox approached them about selling. Presumably some exec at eM Client made the decision to shut it down however. Then they asked for suggestion on how to improve eM Client. Not sure what they got out of the deal besides access to a cranky user-base, most of whom won’t become customers.
YES! Color is underused as a signifier in Mac design. Lingering effects of Jobs/Ivey aesthetic, I suppose.
I checked the MailMate web site, and they’re recommending using the latest beta. But the date on the latest beta is January 2023. This makes me wonder: Is this software still under active development or is it stuck where it is?
My understanding is that it’s a single developer who works fairly slowly being a one-man shop, so updates don’t come super regularly.
If you go to the Issue-Tracker section of the MailMate website, you can see regular postings with responses from the developer as recently as the past few days stretching back regularly into the past, so there’s definitely recent activity.
A one-man shop has obvious risks but there are plenty of examples of single-developers continuing to work steadily on their software for years or decades, so who knows?
I’m able to configure MailMate to a close enough approximation of how I used Postbox that I’m willing to take the risk. Worst case, MailMate shuts down at some point and I’m not worse off than I was when Postbox closed down.
Eudora was my first and only love! Sigh. Postbox was a second-class substitute. (Sounds like a 50’s love song…) So I thought what the heck, I’ll give eMClient a try whilst running it in parallel with Postbox.
After some tinkering to clean up the inevitable little troubles with importing folders, etc., and some more tinkering to get things to mimic Postbox/Eudora, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I’m liking eMClient – it can be made to work like Postbox, minus many of the quibbles I had with it. The one question I had with a default setting I could not get rid of in eMClient was immediately answered by a forum moderator. Cool, so far. Fingers crossed…
Em Client user here by only on the mac. Still use mail on ios.
I jumped from mail on the mac at the last second after the rules went. I needed my own folders , rules and search functions. Not going to gmail. Couldnt get on with thunderbird.
In the whole i have been very happy with it. The updates are not that often but the latest gap has been because of the conversion to a new ai like option v10 and now ai integration ( i think ).
Only issue i had was answered in the forums and the people there seem very helpful.
Only crashes I have had have been very occasional ( but obviously annoying ) . It does a recovery and check which is nice but I burst out laughing when I saw it as I felt it was just short of a blue screen of death background.
As an app I would give it 8.5 / 10 and say it’s well worth a try but as a Mac app only 7/10 as it’s very much written like a windows controlled app missing nice arty features
However I am of to look at mail mate and keep an eye on other answers on here
I have used Postbox for years. But its not a big issue. Thunderbird is the same like Postbox with more Functions. Calendar.
eM Client is a European Product available in 20 Languages. Calendar, Notes, Chat included. Way better then Apple mail for sure. Business version available too.
Em Client is not that bad. There are way more Function as in Postbox. The Company is solid. 20 Employees. HQ in Prag and now an office in SF. The software is available in 20 Languages.
I never used Apple Scribed in email for at least 30 years.
Eudora, Thunderbird, Postbox, em Client and a few other. No Apple Mail not professional enough for Business.
I let run Postoffice for a while. Thunderbird is Backup 1
There is a comprehensive list of e-mail clients for the Macintosh here:
http://www.macattorney.com/mail.html
It’s sad because I like to tag my email and archive it. Postbox was very easy at doing that while Thunderbird and now emClient does not have hotkeys for that so a click in a side menu and select. It also presented the mail very nicely. Also Postbox let you store it’s address books, prefs, tags (topics) and filters in a shared folder like on Dropbox so you had the same config no matter where you ran it from (laptop/desktop).
I’ve got Thunderbird running and had it so for awhile now side by side but it has proven to be slow (even on M1) at rendering the email as well as trying to catch up, it’s just a bit slow and clunky. They have been working on it but the pace of updates is very slow unless you run the beta. They do have a plan to shift to monthly releases if you want to in the future but not sure when. Also they are suppose to have a sync service at some point to sync address books, tags etc so hopefully that’s coming soon. On the plus side there are a couple of extensions I do use, send later to schedule an email and Remindr to flag or have a pop up on email you need to follow up on later. Also quicktext for canned responses is one I use a lot (like Postbox responses).
Trying out emClient and while it’s not a native mac app it has some nice features including quicktext, send late, snooze as well as tags. There’s promise there, it’s also very fast like Mac Mail. Mail app is so close to being good but lacks features I need (like canned responses and tags). Airmail is pretty good too but I find they are falling behind in some areas and no tags.
Just my opinion - hopefully the folks at Thunderbird are going to get moving a little faster.
So… I installed emClient. It imports exceedingly well. I haven’t tried the calendar integration but it’s probably worth switching from Apple’s calendar servers someday regardless (since they break so often except in BusyCal).
It is incredibly configurable, including the skins, so you can set up just about all the backgrounds, fonts, etc. that’s a very powerful feature. It highlights every other line by default like Eudora used to, if I recall correctly. There’s a LOT of clever. It also has a key command to file messages into folders, with a search feature.
It might be Windows based but they really make it quite Mac-like. I have no complaints on that score.
I can’t really use it as my primary because my institution won’t accept it as an Exchange client. That’s a problem for most email clients which keeps me stuck with Apple Mail! (Or I guess whatever bloated junk MS has these days.)
I think it’s worth using the free trial before you make up your mind. It has some powerful features. I ended up shutting off a lot of them! but you do have pretty granular control, which is unusual.
That said, I also own MailMate and will try that for a week or two as well. I’d really like MailMaven from what I can see - but I’d also really like to just use Apple Mail if only they’d let me easily file messages into folders. What the !&*#@^! is up with that being missing? (I’d also like more control over the order of the accounts, how they display, etc., but while I’m wishing why not want to customize colors of folders in the Finder sidebar…)
It’s under very active development, but the developer is cautious about releasing ‘official’ versions (even betas). However, he releases regular test versions, the latest being at the end of August.
https://updates.mailmate-app.com/release_notes_archive/MailMate_r6065.html
Index of /archives
In general, I find the test versions to be very stable. There are occasional ones that have caused issues, but I don’t update to every new version (and avoid issues by waiting to see if others report any). Every few months I see what the latest one is, read through the release notes to see what’s changed, and if I haven’t heard of any issues on the mailing list I update to it. Signup for the mailing list and archives are on the contact page.
If you want somewhere to start, I’m currently running release 6056 (from 18 July) and it’s been very stable with my 142,670 emails and multiple accounts. That said, I’ve not heard of any issues with the latest test release (6065), so if you’re starting it’s probably worth using that one. And I highly recommend it, it has a lot of the great little touches Eudora did and much more, and is very configurable.
Another Eudora refuge here. . . I made it work until 2011, when I paid $18 for a GyazMail license.
Amazingly, 13 years later I am still using GyazMail. I just checked and I’ve created 516 “rules” (filters) over the years. (I’m somewhat OCD when it comes to my email.)
My wife and I use Runbox.com in Norway as our email provider with a personal domain. We’ve stuck with POP because switching to IMAP was never attractive to me; even 13 years ago redoing all my folders & filters was too daunting a project. And I’ve always tended to access my email from my primary Mac vs. my portable Macs and iOS devices.
I do not archive my email; anything worth saving (which ain’t much) is kept elsewhere. I used to save a lot in Eudora. I kept my software license info in Eudora since that is how such transactions were handled back then. But when I needed to resave everything I began keeping the software stuff in a password manager. I trashed a lot of messages when I finally deleted Eudora.
I have backup accounts at GMail and Proton and Runbox also offers webmail. But I have always preferred having my messages downloaded to an email client on my Mac. (I may finally be ready to delete my Google account since GMail is all I use and only rarely.)
GyazMail is a one-person show run by Goichi Hirakawa in Japan. The few times that I have needed tech support Goichi has responded pretty quickly. GyazMail is on the Mac Attorney list and he says positive things about it. But I doubt that the app attracts many email power-users.
Another Eudora-to-Postbox switcher here. I may stay with Postbox indefinitely.
One Postbox feature I didn’t see discussed above is the ability to edit a received email message before saving it. My main use for this is to change the subject line to reflect the topic that an email thread actually covers, making future searches for that topic much easier. Do any other email clients allow this?
And on this issue, I read the other day on a Postbox forum that the app’s latest updates removed this “edit” feature! Thank goodness I didn’t rush to update upon hearing about the sale! (I’m using v 7.0.60; I think the scuttlebutt was that the removal occurred in v 7.0.62.)
I haven’t yet found anything that replicates Postbox’s topic feature. That and the ability to focus down within my inbox are my two key features.
Yet another long time Eudora user. I eventually switched to Mac Mail and used it for several years, but I finally had to switch my work account to Postbox because of unpredictable fonts when replying. I have lots of “template” messages stored as signatures, and if I try to insert a signature at the top of a reply, the font and/or size is often different from what was in the prior message, even when it knows to match with the other message. It looks fine to me, but not to the recipient. Postbox handles this much better. Don’t know if I’ll use it until it dies, or start looking for another client. Wish the Eudora copyright owners would contribute the code to the public domain and allow someone else to resurrect it.
They did, but it didn’t work out.
I, too, moved from Eudora, first to AppleMail, then ended up with Postbox (checking out others along the way) which I bought on Christmas eve, 2010. I just spent the last few weeks testing eM Client, and also checked out most of the other options listed here and elsewhere.
I’ve decided to go with eM Client, even though the modifications I made have not completely matched the workflows I had with Postbox. There’s enough similarity at this point that it’s worth it to me.
Other apps had one problem or another, or didn’t have an iOS app which I now want (and which PB never had, by the way). There are too many features that PB had (and which I’ve largely reproduced in eM Client) that AppleMail still doesn’t have. I’m not interested in a web-only app, and I left Gmail long ago (due to their data-mining practices via student Chromebooks at the school I was working at, and on general principle), so Mimestream is out. After being forced to wrestle with Outlook at various jobs over decades, I am thrilled to never look back on it again.
A bit off-topic: My e-mail providers are Fastmail and easyMail, and if either came up with a Mac + iOS app, I would definitely check those out, as both have been great, especially Fastmail. Importing them into eM Client and using them has been flawless.
I’m still puzzled why this particular and still important means of communication has been so hard to get and look right after such a long time.
I agree; I’m just as confused. I’d love to find a better email client.
Fastmail’s webmail is too good in their opinion, and it is the best webmail implementation I’ve ever seen, to warrant a native app.
Most folks just use texting way more and use webmail only when they need email. But, it’s not a first choice to email.
A follow-on: One of the things I’ve disliked about Postbox is that it is one of the email clients that does not integrate with SpamSieve…so I’ve spent the past few years out in the wilderness, as has SpamSieve. My inbox ballooned to over 40,000 unread messages, almost all of them spamvertising. My recourse has been to set up Postbox filters to try to sift out some of the good marketing (and items like TidBITs) from the crap. Not ideal.
So I decided today to give Apple Mail another go. As I sit here I’ve migrated the one big email box (using IMAP, so no big deal), but it feels so limited. I have SpamSieve doing its thing, and it is in the process of winnowing out the junk after a cursory training. But I already know I’m not going to be happy with this…especially since I’ve wanted to integrate my email with the Activity panel on Busy Contacts, and I found out that Apple closed up all pathways to let BusyMac do that with the two most current MacOS releases.
So, the intersection of SpamSieve and Busy Contacts use turns out to be MailMate. Since I’m doing this winnowing using the IMAP interface on my own server, I’ll let the decluttering finish, then download the MM client.
Side gripe: it seems like contact managers and email clients are the most unstable applications to implement, relatively speaking of course. I don’t want to rehash all the excellent information above, but I fervently hope that (1) MailMate survives for a while longer, and (2) that BusyMac will someday release a Busy Contacts v2.
Thank you for that list. Rediscovered Edison Mail and am trying it out. Much better than it was.
Having a new 16GB M2 Air helps as well when running multiple Electron apps.
(I’ve been running Corona (on your Accounting list) since 2020. Best I’ve seen for my peculiar needs and nothing else works. Very hard to find, though.)
I’m glad that you found my Macintosh E-Mail Software list helpful.
http://www.macattorney.com/mail.html
Actually, I just updated it two days ago. We lost several e-mail clients, but gained the same number.
What I really appreciated about Postbox were all the frequent updates, at least a couple every month. And then they started slowing down.
Postbox moved to monthly subscription sales, and then added the option of a one-time licence, suggesting to me that they were experiencing financial difficulties. They also started charging for technical support, another indication of bank account problems.
Although I have looked into other options, but the time being, I’m going to keep using Postbox. R.I.P.
I’m using MailMaven as my primary email app, have been for several months. It’s still in beta but quite stable. I love the features. The beta team is super responsive.
Joe Kissell at Take Control Books is working on a book about MailMaven to be released when the product goes out of beta. It could be helpful to early adopters. 30% discount for TidBITS members.
There is an early version of Joe’s book on the MailMaven website.
What I especially like about Postbox is its clean interface. When you move from one account to another account, only the folders for that account are displayed in the sidebar, unlike in other email clients where it seems that you have to hide the folders from other accounts manually. If there are any other email clients that behave like Postbox in this respect, or if there is some setting that I have missed in other email clients, I would love to know. I also like the fact that Postbox is not afraid of colour, unlike Apple’s Mail.