Ask HN: Anyone else want a better OS X Mail client?

[BreakoutList]

This is my RFP :-)

Mailbox.app isn't very good. Mail.app isn't either.

I'd gladly pay $50 for something better than Mailbox, with the cut-off for 'good' being that I switch to the app and don't go back to Mailbox after 30 days.

I've mentioned this to a few other people, and they've echoed it back with even stronger feelings. I had someone tell me they would pay hundreds right now. I'm not saying there's a startup there, but there's definitely a product there.

Question: Do others outside of the valley (or inside, I suppose) feel this pain?

[akg_67]

What are the issues people mention about Mail.app? Are these issues the 'real' pain points, solution to which users are willing to pay? How much? I use Mail.app and feel there is no "painful" issue for which I will be willing to pay to be fixed.

You can always find people who will complain about any product. But the strong enough pain for them to pay and switch is whole another ballgame. Most will shriek away as soon as they have to pay for a product and change their routine/familiarity of using a known bundled product.

> Mailbox.app isn't very good. Mail.app isn't either.

If you lead any discussion or discovery with such statements, you will always find people who agree with the statement. Most are just reflecting with the sentiment in your question/statement. A good example of this behavior is seen on the segment of Jimmy Kimmel's late night TV show. His people go out on street and ask strangers for their opinion on 'obvious make believe' news and statements. The responses of strangers are hilarious.

It is not a particularly good way to validate market.

[BreakoutList]

Heh. I don't want to solve it myself. I want someone to solve it. I will pay $50 for a bug-free version of the previous version of Mailbox.app, today.

Edit: Looks like Mailbox has fixed the app. Nice.

[rz2k]

I think there's a quasi-cynical opportunity in developing any category of product that is regularly acquired then quietly allowed to die. For example, it seems like not having a lot of people using a client like Sparrow was worth more to Google than people are willing to pay for an alternative to the browser-based client. Furthermore, because there are a lot of corner cases in IMAP that you must be sufficiently skilled to address, and users have high expectations about reliability, making a good enough client to gain traction is a good sign about your value as an engineer for the acquiring company.

Perhaps a great feature to make such a client's slow death through acquisition even more desirable would be seamless end-to-end encryption so that users' emails provided no marketing data.

[mtmail]

Did you try https://postbox-inc.com/ ? It's based on Mozilla Thunderbird

[tnecniv]

This is my client of choice!

[rsto]

Yes. I'm currently using Mail.app and plan to switch to another client (and don't know which one, yet).

I haven't tried out Mailbox.app but as I understand it only works on Yosemite so that's not an option for me.

I'd also pay up to 50$ if the application is stable, handles mail only (no "productivity suite") and will be updated and maintained for a long time.

[eli_oat]

I used Mutt for two years or so...then mailbox app came along. Then it updated yesterday. Now I'm back to using Mutt.

[mnort9]

Airmail is pretty good...

[bsg75]

MailMate is so far the one I have stuck with: http://freron.com/

[akvadrako]

It's definitely the best for heavy users. I really only care about performance and Postbox, Mail.app, Thunderbird, Outlook and mutt were all too slow.

I haven't tried Mailbox.app, but it's got some weird Dropbox integration so I wouldn't bother.

[ju]

This is it: http://www.kiwiforgmail.com/

[tylerFowler]

Mailbox was great... until this last update

[ingenieros]

Great might be a bit of a stretch considering that in order to get new emails with graphics to load properly I had to constantly refresh my window by clicking on an older message and then back on the new emails. I'm surprised it took them this long to release a fix, but just this week they've released 3 updates and new messages with graphics are loading just fine.