The State of Email Clients on the Apple Platform

Like any self-respecting hipster child, I was fascinated with email clients before email clients were a thing. Apps like Barebone’s Mailsmith, Qualcomm’s Eudora, Netscape’s sub-app which became Thunderbird, and even crusty old Outlook Express for Mac were in constant rotation at my house. Even that far back, I indulged my bad habit of jumping between applications, wishing that there was some sort of hybrid of the clients.

For several years now, the email client has captured the imagination of developers, indie and otherwise. The general thinking was that email is broken, so we’re going to fix it with this or that particular gimmick. The audience of us nerds gets excited, but in the end, the app really doesn't offer much in terms of utility and has little commercial success.

It turns out that the most successful clients are not ambitious in terms of changing email's underlying paradigm. Raw functionality and elegant UI touches that complement the classical idea of email seem to thrive. More often than not the gimmicky products fail in very basic ways as they ignore major features that have made email a mainstay in our digital lives. Even if radical new ideas are well-implemented, normal folks don’t want to take time from being productive to learn something new.

Successful features introduced within the last several years have included fluid gestures to act on email, snoozing messages, using attachments from file storage services, and integrating with third party productivity applications. These features are now almost universal among most half-decent clients.

Developers have approached implementing email using either client-side logic or server-side processing or a bit of both. Apps like Mailbox  used servers in order to snooze messages and supply push notifications, while Dispatch and others eschew the cloud for data privacy. I have the feeling that people are tiring of worrying about government data snooping and are more willing to share email credentials with third parties for greater convenience.

An email application is an expensive and inadvisable pursuit because of the underlying complexities of dealing with various protocols and handling screwy edge-case services. There has been more than a handful of vaporware that got hung up on overcoming the thorny technicalities of email. Even my beloved MailMate, the most functional email clients for Mac by one of the most talented developers, is barely unsustainable, with Benny having to resort to crowd funding and relying on his wife’s company in order to continue to support it.

At this point, on OS X I’ve been using MailMate as well as FastMail’s web interface. On iOS I have been a bit torn, alternating between a multitude of clients, but often settling on Outlook. Frederico of Macstories recently wrote about switching full time to the Airmail. With iPad support in the most recent update, Airmail now supports all Apple devices. There are lots of integrations and keyboard shortcuts and they've done a great job using iCloud to sync app settings. I might use Airmail as well if it handled FastMail’s version of Starred emails properly, but until then it is not an option.

Overall, the latest iterations of email have provided benefits to regular people. Incremental improvements have found their way into the largest email providers’ products and there seems to be a couple of new email clients for the Apple platform coming out every half-year or so. I wish the email indie developers luck on their difficult quest to build the next big email app. As always, I’ll be watching with great interest.