IMAP was effectively damaging the MacStories team with slow search, lack of push notifications, and the inability to try modern clients with useful features.
There are many things worth fighting for in life, but, ultimately, my refusal to use Gmail is no longer one of them. Last year, fed up with the slowness of IMAP and lack of innovation in that space, I realized that the MacStories team needed to move back to Google Apps. In those three years, third-party developers had also started chasing the white whale of email reinvention with proprietary features that locked users into silos – the snooze features of Mailbox are a good example. In the arc of three years, Apple had started allowing email clients on the Store, released the iPad, and kept improving its own Mail app with features such as VIP contacts, photo attachments, and custom mailboxes. As the MacStories team grew, we moved our system to Google Apps in 2010, where we stayed for almost three years until, tired of Google’s stance on user data and privacy, I decided to go back to IMAP to have more control on our mailboxes and messages. There was no iPad back then and Apple wasn’t allowing third-party email clients on the App Store. When I started MacStories in 2009, I chose to go with an IMAP server that I could use with Apple Mail on my iPhone and Mac. I should also provide some context about the email services I’ve tried, left, and embraced again. 1 In other words: why can’t email apps be smarter and work on any platform for any email service? To truly reimagine email – for many, still an essential component of a daily workflow – a mobile client would have to bring the intelligence and versatility of a mobile-first world to the stale nature of email protocols. Our smartphones and tablets have a much deeper understanding of our schedule, files, location, contacts, and most used apps than they did eight years ago – a knowledge certainly superior to any desktop computer. Today, being “desktop-class” is almost a liability for apps.
#Best mac email client read receipts portable#
When Apple introduced Mail for iPhone in 2007, they bragged about its desktop-class approach to email on a portable device. It’s also fundamentally limited and incomplete, with a vision that isn’t fully realized yet but promising potential for the future. I’ve been using Spark for the past three weeks, and it’s the most versatile email client for iPhone I’ve ever tried. By combining smart features with thoughtful design, Readdle is hoping that Spark won’t make you dread your email inbox, knowing that an automated system and customizable integrations will help you process email faster and more enjoyably. To achieve this, Readdle has built Spark over the past eighteen months on top of three principles: heuristics, integrations, and personalization. Spark by Readdle, a new email app for iPhone released today, wants to enhance email with intelligence and flexibility. Each one revolutionary and shortsighted in its own way, always far from the utopia of email reinvention on mobile.
I’ve seen email clients for iOS rise and fall (and be abandoned) I’ve tried many apps that promised to bring email in the modern age of mobile and cloud services but that ultimately just replaced existing problems with new ones.
Part of the problem has been the Sisyphean effort of third-party apps that tried to modernize email: the more developers attempted to reinvent it, the more antiquated standards, platform limitations, and economic realities kept dragging them down.
I’ve had a complicated relationship with email over the years.
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