I will not beat a dead horse with my "mutt is superior because they know the best they cannot do is suck without confessing it" trope, but almost all email clients lack is Maildir.<p>Even if you are not a technical user, you should respect the fact that proprietary formats will bite you. Look how many this guy alone used. If you use opensource, even, the mbox and mh all email, one giant file paradigm is all nice until it is corrupted.<p>I wish more clients respected Maildir underneath, or tried to bend the truth on Windows FAT32 and NTFS ad the ; in path names limitation is a pain.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir#Filesystem_Compatibility_Issues" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir#Filesystem_Compatibili...</a><p>Sadly even Thunderbird has struggled to re-engineer a Maildir subsystem where it was never intended. Show me any email client devs who had the khutzpah to even dare that.<p><a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845952" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845952</a><p>But you have a lot of safety in spreading it across files, and you can throw dumber full text search at it, shell scripts, and a lot more flexibility over all.<p>Sadly, some Unixisms will never escape Unix culture. As someone who has watched people screw 10+ years of email in Thunderbird n>1 times, I wish for the love of God everyone would use Maildir in the client, regardless of interface, free or not, et cetera.
No mention of Postbox (<a href="https://www.postbox-inc.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.postbox-inc.com</a>)? It's based on Thunderbird, but has very good support for conversations and archiving (Gmail-like workflow) even for non-Gmail providers. It also has nice native looking styles for macOS and Windows.<p>For me, it is one of the best clients... although I use primarily windows and sometimes Linux (where it works fine with wine), so I can't try the macOS-only ones.
For what it's worth, I have been using Outlook for Mac for about a year now and have really enjoyed it. Categorizing emails by folder is, well, what Outlook has always done well and search is surprisingly good.<p>Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I don't need any glitz and glam in my email client. I just want it to work and show me the email I want to see when I want to see it.
A friend uses MailMate[0]. It seems to be a bit pricey (50 USD), but considering it shot the fundraising campaign for the next release by 170%[1], I'm sure there are fans here.<p>[0]: <a href="https://freron.com/" rel="nofollow">https://freron.com/</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailmate-2-0-the-email-client-for-the-rest-of-us#/" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailmate-2-0-the-email-cl...</a>
> My kingdom for a unified inbox and a Mac app. I would never leave Google Inbox again. It’s almost perfect – stable, amazing Google-powered search, snoozing by time and location, all the bells and whistles.<p>I've used Fluid.app[1] to create 'standalone applications' of webpages. It's always worked great, and is almost what the OP is asking for for 'inbox'.<p>[1]<a href="http://fluidapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://fluidapp.com/</a>
I feel Email has evolved organically since eons and what we have today is like the way humans have evolved over millions of years. While the standard look and feel remains the same pretty much, it has become one's identity for receiving messages on the web of all forms and types, of all needs from commerce to friends to business.<p>It is also a database of all our past communications. Apart that mobile adds further complexity. It is likely that any one answer for it can miss out things in the enthusiasm to bring out a simpler version or in the over-enthusiasm to make it complicated than what it should.<p>It is hard to quantify the "needs" as it caters to a wide audience as a one stop answer. Slack like app can take away the professional side, or a Facebook can take away the social side, but no matter what, you still need a email as it serves as the identity to reach out for the Web applications.<p>So whoever is building a new email App needs to keep all of this in mind and come out with something nifty yet powerful.
This is off topic, but the typeface in that article looks terrible in Firefox on Windows 8.1. All of the lower case e's are missing the horizontal line:<p><a href="http://imgur.com/ShUxi15" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/ShUxi15</a><p>Does it look okay in your browser?
I tried all mentioned in the post and comments. I am currently using MailMate (<a href="https://freron.com/" rel="nofollow">https://freron.com/</a>) It is still lacking, but does most of the things I personally need.
I've used Gmail since 2004, when they had invites and everyone wanted one. I use Outlook for iOS at work and think it's great, although there's issues getting signatures to transfer when your company uses Sharepoint.<p>Email is a non issue for most people because most people just use a web browser and a mobile app. For the record, I wasn't impressed with Outlook for the Mac.
On the other hand iOS doesn't really support the use of alternatives to the built-in Mail app. I was trying Google Inbox in a new iPad where I didn't configure the built-in Mail, but then I wanted to mail a link to a web page from Safari and I couldn't. It seems is not possible to tell iOS or Safari that I want my emails to be sent through Inbox :(
I tried most of the ones on the list. I'm currently using [Spark](<a href="https://sparkmailapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://sparkmailapp.com/</a>) not as buggy as Airmail, mailbox many of the features I liked from both.
While I also think email apps are not great, especially when trying to find a unified experience with macOS and iOS, I think CloudMagic for iOS is pretty good and Nylas N1 for macOS is also very good. maybe if N1 comes to iOS..
The problem is the economics of non-SAS applications: getting an email client right is hard and the free alternatives are good enough for plebe-tier users. $4.99 a one-time pop isn't going to get it done.
I'm pretty happy...<p>OSX: Mail.app does the job very well, little bloat.<p>Linux: I like Geary. Lean but not as good as Mail.app though<p>Windows: Mailbird. Light but also not as good as Mail.app<p>For Business I have Outlook.<p>None is perfect but all do what I need in the corresponding context.
Here's another new one to try <a href="http://dejalu.me/" rel="nofollow">http://dejalu.me/</a> (from one of the creators of Sparrow)