Why is apple mail.app so ... bad?

[eclipse]

As I said as a comment elsewhere and then decided it needs it's own thread:

#52
When apple is the 9th largest corporation in the world, and that's competing with Big Oil and King Coal, I'm surprised that their mail.app is seen as so inferior by mac users?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue

Is it just not a priority? They have (according to the wiki) about $215 billion in annual revenue and 110,000 employees. Spark has 85 employees. Can someone explain why all the other features in the other apps that people have mentioned here are not already in Apple's mail.app, with bells on it?

Also, it's worth noting Spark is developed by a company in the Ukraine.
In a civil war!

 

[daflake]

Which mail app do you think is better? As a windows user, the mail app on my phone is far better than anything I can get elsewhere. Most of the time I just use my browser on my PC to log into Gmail or grab my iPhone to send it. I prefer my iPhone to anything else out there.

 

[eclipse]

I had a bad experience with mail crashing repeatedly recently, and when I logged in here and browsed around MacRumours I found so many people recommending other mail apps over mail because they had xyz functionality, etc. That's what surprised me. Faithful mac users saying mail is buggy, underfeatured, can't push Gmail properly, etc.

 

[geta]

Even if Apple's Mail app is not perfect, i wouldn't trust and use any of the third party mail apps with storing my mails on their servers. Before i would use the native mail app from the provider if they having one, since anyways they are storing my mails on their servers to begin with.

 

[eclipse]

I'm not hating on mail, I'm just confused that it does not appear to be a higher priority for development. I use mail!

 

[Jmgilliam18]

Can you do multiple accounts on the mail.app?

 

[chabig]

Can you do multiple accounts on the mail.app?

Of course.

 

[Jmgilliam18]

I think why some people (me included) feel it's so bad is the # of options. When you go to settings for mail, there are like 6 options.

Email, Spark, Airmail have pages of options to make the program fit to your usage needs and preferences. Some are basic but convenient and some are advanced. Filters, what happens after you delete a message, snoozing messages, scheduling messages etc.

They should step it up.

 

[saberahul]

Couldn't agree more. Mail works well for it is designed to do, but it is not intuitive and therefore a hassle to use. Spark and others are well designed, but I, who has tried every single mail app on the App Store, can't seem to get away from Outlook. The original designer did a really good job and Microsoft has done a great job of implementing 365 features (Calendar availability as an example). If you're a 365 user or your company uses it or you use Outlook, it's the best

 

[pacorob]

Here is a list of great e-mail apps and their features which is still pretty up to date.
Best options out there from third parties are:
* Spark
* Airmail
* Email by Easylido

 

[willmtaylor]

As I said as a comment elsewhere and then decided it needs it's own thread:

Also, it's worth noting Spark is developed by a company in the Ukraine.
In a civil war!

Yes, of course there’s discussion of alternatives, but when polled, many-to-most users generally express that they still use the stock Mail app.

Apple’s software (and hardware for that matter) is historically slow to adopt new features first pioneered by others.

 

[Jmgilliam18]

Here is a list of great e-mail apps and their features which is still pretty up to date.
Best options out there from third parties are:
* Spark
* Airmail
* Email by Easylido

Vote here for Email by Easilydo. Very polished app.

 

[pacorob]

Vote here for Email by Easilydo. Very polished app.

It is although I still have a few issues with it. I'm also a daily user of it.

Issues that annoy me the most are:
- zooming in on HTML doesn't go well
- showing HTML e-mails sometimes look very small and zoomin in doesn't work too well
- photo attachments can only opened one by one. I would like to scroll to all my photo attachments as you can with Mail from Apple for instance

 

[k2graphics]

I think why some people (me included) feel it's so bad is the # of options. When you go to settings for mail, there are like 6 options.

Email, Spark, Airmail have pages of options to make the program fit to your usage needs and preferences. Some are basic but convenient and some are advanced. Filters, what happens after you delete a message, snoozing messages, scheduling messages etc.

They should step it up.

What frustrates me is that the Mail app is much more intuitive as a program on OSX, and the IOS app appears to have far fewer features than the OSX version. Perhaps, because it's less intuitive than the OSX version (e.g. the bold/italic formatting is accessed very differently in IOS than on OSX), I'm just not seeing some of the features (like color).