Again, I find myself at a crossroads. Being a Mac person, and relying heavily on Google’s email products (I have 5 different email identities, all hosted on Google’s Gmail or G-suite apps), I must have a mail client that works well with the Google way.
Alas, the built in Apple mail client is okay, but on alternating releases they really foul up the way it works with the Google imap/smtp world. Not fail, but irregularities and some general suckage.
Word has it that in the new 10.12 MacOS Sierra it is good again. But I know that will change. Again.
About 5 months ago, I stumbled on CloudMagic, which seemed truly magic with the Google world, and its iOS clients were great too. But a couple weeks ago, they flipped their business model, and now it is $50 a year subscription. So I needed to switch clients.
Why switch? You liked CloudMagic (now Newton)? Because, I spend $50 a year for Google to provide my email, that includes running the imap and smtp server, providing the storage (and 30gigs of drive space too), and some of the best spam filtering out there. Here is CloudMagic expecting the same amount of money to just be a client, albeit a slick one. Maybe $10 a year, but for $50? They can go right to hell.
I bit the bullet and added all my mail accounts to the Microsoft Outlook 2016 that came with my copy of Office. That worked reasonably well, but there were a couple of google based accounts that it wouldn’t authenticate with (because Outlook doesn’t support OAUTH2), so it failed to be a “universal” solution. Too bad, because other than that failure, it was a solid performer.
I will say that on my iOS devices, I am using the Outlook client, and it in short is incredibly good, but it is fundamentally different than the MacOS version.
I found myself going back to Postbox. It is a client I bought licenses to a few years back, essentially a fork of Thunderbird, but with some active development, and great features layered on top. They just moved the needle from version 4 to 5, and I am using the version 5. It is pretty solid, I have all my Google accounts set up, and so far it is pretty solid. Of course, it is still downloading and indexing (that takes a few days in the background when I change), so I need to give it a couple of weeks to digest.
Why is this so difficult?
