I regularly try Apple Mail on MacOS, but I’m never satisfied. In few words:
- I need something like “smart notifications” to only notify for important emails, and not all my incoming emails
- Group emails (like what Gmail do), for exemple Newsletters, Notifications/ Promotional, …
If possible, I would like to use the same app on MacOS and iOS (iPad & iPhone). But Apple Mail is the worst app I’ve ever tested…
I’m currently using Spark (Desktop on MacOS + app on iPhone & iPad), the app is really good but not in term on privacy, dependent to a 3rd party, ….
What are you using for your emails on MacOS?
Thunderbird. Free and open source, thus no corporate data collection garbage. Even supports extensions like uBlock Origin and comes with PGP encryption built in. They’ve recently had a major design overhaul as well.
I’d strongly advise against using Spark if you want your emails to remain private.
Not the best advice I can give you. Spark mail client, what looks really beautiful on the outside hides a lot of sorrow underneath, if only you find the time to go through their T&C’s, 2-3y ago when I checked, there was a clause there that was saying they’re allowed to download ALL your emails — which to me is a mental breach to privacy.
I’ve arrived at an age that beautiful UI/UX does not sell it for me anymore unless I get privacy — privacy on should be default IMO; but sadly, we live in a world where this became tabu nowadays… which is quite unfortunate. Personally I just stick with Apple Mail; I receive emails, I can reply back, it’s private enough — enough for me.
I need something like “smart notifications” to only notify for important emails, and not all my incoming emails Group emails (like what Gmail do), for exemple Newsletters, Notifications/ Promotional, …
To make this work with Mail.app, you can use server-side filter rules to sort stuff into respective folders. The big advantage of course being that it doesn’t depend on what your client can do (but if you can’t use server-side, you can also set up rules directly in Mail.app itself). As for notifications, you can filter them with a “Smart Mailbox” (including checking that it’s in a certain folder so you can re-use the rule processing) + setting message notifications to only trigger for that smart mailbox.
Spark is pretty good. Has a nice MacOS and iOS app. I like the behaviour of swiping your email as “done” to make it disappear and keep your inbox clean. This is different from moving read email to a folder. You can set the default view of your inbox to only see email that have not been marked as “done”. Search is good too.
I like Spark a lot
Gmail. Never took the time to set the mail app!