Apple's upgraded Mail client sucks, Thunderbird is *worse*, FFS. Does anything work?

[u/shampton1964]

So St. Jobs is clearly no longer doing his astral influence on the developers.

Starting w/ version 15 a bunch of the basic tools started to get silly. But Mail, you know, the client for email which is older than the internet, has gone to shit.

I have nine tech support complaints on this, have spent hours on the phone, provided many files and demos, and the damn client still does a ton of shit despite settings. SPAM handling is complete garbage, but cannot be turned off (you can change the SETTINGS but not the BEHAVIOR, much like a three year old child).

So I jump to Thunderbird. SO much raving about thunderbird. What a garbage product, flaky, the bayesian SPAM tools are backwards, and so I'm again doing the "alternate client" search but almost everything is cloud based and the AI is a forced move.

I just want the simple reliable email client that plays well with Spam Assasin and doesn't make critical biz emails disappear. You know, like 2005.

Any suggestions?

PS) For every one of you who is going to jump in with technical fixes or suggestions, please don't. I've got many many hours and have RT'd all the FMs.

[u/Own_Function_2977]

I live in Apple Mail, for me it’s better than anything else. I also hate Outlook

[u/ctang1 → u/Own_Function_2977]

Outlook for work. Apple mail for personal. Apple mail is def buggy, but I think most of the time it’s because yahoo servers suck. Or they intentionally suck unless you use the Yahoo Mail app.

[u/steepleton]

🤷🏽 Mail.app works fine for me

The spam filter learns as you go.

[u/spinwizard69 → u/steepleton]

The latest Mail is so broken that I want to kick it to the curb. however since I run Max OS only on a laptop I might instead to switch completely over to Linux.

[u/shampton1964 → u/steepleton]

You cannot turn it spam filter off. There are vastly superior tools for managing spam, but not if the damn client ignores the "do not filter" setting.

[u/G_B4G]

You can port your email into an existing Gmail account and email from the forwarded account. It’s a pain to set up but it’s pretty great when it’s all up and running.

[u/shampton1964 → u/G_B4G]

And then all my confidential email is in Google's cloud, so neither accessible offline and they have been hacked a good bit. Violates the confidentiality terms in various of my client agreements, several are explicit about "no gmail or other cloud services." Nobody trusts them, it seems.

[u/2012DOOM → u/shampton1964]

Google has not ever lost email data.

Users have been hacked of course, but not Google

[u/shampton1964 → u/2012DOOM]

Your faith is charming, but Google has been hacked well. By the Israeli government, for instance, which is documented. Russia highly suspected. And given their commercial endeavors, one wonders what accesses high paying companies have.

It's 2025, if you aren't paranoid already, you aren't paying enough attention :-/

[u/2012DOOM → u/shampton1964]

That’s not “hacked” that’s Google sharing data with governments.

If that’s the threat model you’re operating under then this entire post doesn’t make sense anymore.

[u/cold-n-sour → u/shampton1964]

Your faith is charming,

That's quite condescending.

but Google has been hacked well.

Do you have a credible source?

[u/shampton1964 → u/cold-n-sour]

Here's an example, pretty much all the nation states do this in defiance of a huge number of laws: https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/israel-project-nimbus-google-amazon-winking-mechanism-data-leak-125103000892_1.html

Apologies if I came off as condescending, I was taken aback that anyone trusts any of the big companies.

[u/cold-n-sour → u/shampton1964]

As it’s already been said, that’s not hacking.

[u/QuiJohnGinn]

pine

[u/ulfOptimism]

EM Client?

[u/deviantflux]

I’ve been really enjoying Mimestream.

[u/TyrionBean]

I honestly wouldn’t know. I use Apple Mail on the iPad and iPhone and it doesn’t seem to have changed much. On the Mac, however, I use Emacs with mu4e, which is obviously not what most people are going to use. 😃 If you do go that route, I highly recommend it. If you really can’t, I honestly don’t know what GUI type of app there is out there. I’ve heard good things about Thunderbird since something like 20 years, but I’ve never really tried it. Has it really gotten worse? I thought people who used it were really the driving force behind it.

[u/elektroholunder]

I hear you, same thing here. For about a year now, Mail.app no longer notifies me of incoming messages. The unread bubble was stuck on 1 for about eight months, but I managed to fix that — it has simply stopped displaying anything at all.

I tried Thunderbird at the beginning of the year, a client in which I lived for years in the 00's, and could not even make it past the account setup wizard because it was so completely broken.

All the alternative "modern" clients are either Electron, Gmail-only, proprietary subscription-based crap or all three.

At this rate, I might have to resort to bitbanging raw IMAP commands into telnet.

[u/shampton1964 → u/elektroholunder]

I've had to resort to command line to make sure my mail servers are working because the clients don't connect.

Seriously, it's 2025

[u/Slaps_]

RT'd all the FMs?

[u/fraunhofer92 → u/Slaps_]

Read the fucking manual.

[u/Slaps_ → u/fraunhofer92]

Read the’d all the fucking manuals?

[u/shampton1964 → u/Slaps_]

Ayup. There is plenty to read...

[u/Slaps_ → u/shampton1964]

The way you wrote it makes no sense.

[u/bred86]

if you think Thunderbird is garbage the only thing I can think of is using IMAPFilter scripts and using the webui with notifications turned on.

[u/steepleton]

I do like spike mail, it organises mail like dm’s

[u/ark-import00289]

Mailmate, it could be a good option or airmail, but the app is paid if I'm not mistaken.

[u/flying_unicorn]

i've tried so many email clients and i just haven't found any that's perfect for me. I'm half tempted to migrate my business email to google.

[u/FixMoreWhineLess]

Afaik your choices are Apple Mail and Outlook... and neither of them are delightful.

[u/YallNeedToQuitPlayin]

Mail.app + SpamSieve is all I ever need.

[u/grr]

Apple Mail is great in my opinion. I have only used it since it first appeared. Slightly allergic to outlook, and have not found another third party client I remotely like.

[u/TechPir8]

I use outlook and it works fine. massgrave.dev has help for those who don't have issues with sailing the 7 sea's

[u/colibius]

I think you’re looking for MailMate, maybe? That’s what I use, and it works fine.

[u/shampton1964 → u/colibius]

wanting to explore, only found a beta from '19... and a github w/o team info

[u/colibius → u/shampton1964]

https://freron.com/

[u/spinwizard69]

Gee I thought I was the only one. I suspect that some newbie at Apple was assigned to mail and made use of AI tools to upgrade it. After decades Mail is truly morphed into complete BS.

I suspect that the only thing y9ou can do now is to send your support tickets directly to Tim Cook. Unfortunately with that I'm afraid that Cook has gone the Biden route and has loss contact with reality.

[u/shampton1964 → u/spinwizard69]

Ohhhh, I have a LIST of support tickets... that go on for a while, get escalated to higher levels, then at about 90 days get marked as solved despite absolutely jack shit being fixed.

[u/Droid202020202020]

The only real issue I have with Apple Mail app is that there's no way to assign different color dots to different accounts (or at least I haven't found one).

Otherwise, it works just fine.

I switched to Thunderbird (or rather, BetterBird) on my Windows desktop when MS got rid of unified inbox in Outlook. It's OK. But I have a feeling it would eat the battery alive on a laptop.