Ask HN: What e-mail client do you use?

3 points by enen 11 years ago | 5 comments

I was about to http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html. A really awesome (it seems to me for now) plugin for Apple Mail that enables tags. But before that I wondered if I haven't missed anything and will regret spending the money. I'd love to use something that I know will be there in 10-20 years rather than pretty and trendy software products like Sparrow... as they all have the same fate - either aqcuired or abandoned. I saw this the other day in the app store - http://www.handle.com/ Looks great! But I doubt it will exist in 2 years. Mailbox seems good but it's owned by Dropbox and that makes me slightly uncomfortable. But I still want something that looks good... and I also love tags/labels which are supported unfortunately only by Gmail and MailTags for Apple Mail. So I don't know if I can switch to something like Mutt.

So what does HN use?

blowski 11 years ago |

Like you, I've tried lots of different mail apps - Mailbox, Sparrow, Airmail. I've enjoyed using Thunderbird, Outlook, Mail. And I've used web interfaces for Gmail, Fastmail, Hotmail, etc.

In the end, which email client I've used has barely made any difference. The key is in processing the emails - forwarding to Evernote for reference, adding to Omnifocus if it's a todo item, replying quickly if I can, or deleting if it's irrelevant.

I found that extra features like tags and snooze just made me more disorganised, instead of less, as I spent more time fiddling with the features and wondering why something had gone wrong.

jfrisby 11 years ago | |

If it were just features, I'd probably agree with you, but Mail.app in particular (doubly so on desktop) seems to have serious issues with syncing of mail, handling of connections when there's non-trivial packet loss, maintaining its internal database consistently/correctly, etc. Some of this may only be an issue if one has many accounts and/or large inboxes but for those of us with, say, an iCloud account, a normal GMail account, and a handful of Google Apps accounts -- and email history stretching back many years -- it's a serious problem.

pauloteixeira 11 years ago |

I don't use email client, I use gmail with two types on inbox (https://cloudup.com/cg0BjXIIg6P). I use only one type of start (blue info) to make things go my second inbox when I have no time for read or answer. Read this trick a long time ago on a blog post and really improve my gmail.

My unique problem with gmail is the android app but I think that since last release it's really better.

PS: always inbox zero, and have 4 emails going to my gmail account

Jugurtha 11 years ago |

I use Thunderbird and have filters for most things, even for myself. I have many e-mail addresses I use for different things.

In my gmail, I have folders and subfolders. I have a folder with my name, emails I sent to myself go there.

I use [<tag>] in subject so that they go to the proper subfolder in my folder, etc.

I use http://hnnotify.com/ to get notifications when someone replies to my comments on Hacker News, by the way.

jakeogh 11 years ago |

alot has tags, and much more. https://github.com/pazz/alot