What email client do you use and why? (Inbox is driving me nuts!)

#discuss #productivity

I've used Inbox by Gmail for a very long time, but it's been a constant battle between an incredible user experience and wading through the spam folder multiple times a day because the spam filter seems way too aggressive.

I'm not ready to use Gmail either because its user-interface leaves much to be desired. So I'm curious as to what we all use!

Top comments (10)

Peter Kim Frank • Feb 15 '18

Is the primary issue that the spam filter seems too aggressive? If so, you can basically turn off the spam filter entirely with a (super broad) filter that tells all emails to "never send to spam." You'd then have to build back up using your own filters, but there are a few tricks that might make it easier.

I wrote an article here on dev.to with some specific methods I use to manage my gMail.

This mass-filter trick might be helpful:

Sean Wood • Feb 16 '18

This seems like a bit of an anti-pattern, but hey 😉 I might give this a go!

Dian Fay • Feb 15 '18

As far as I've been able to tell, there are no good email clients; it's mostly a matter of finding what you're willing to put up with. I've tried several.

Thunderbird: kind of ugly and really wants to be a full-fledged office system when all I actually want is to check my email. I still use it because it's powerful and easy to configure.
Apple Mail: works well enough that I've never bothered trying to replace it on my Macbook.
Sylpheed/Claws: works but clunky.
Inky: I liked where they were going with the UI, but I was less than thrilled about needing an umbrella account. Also it had major stability issues when I tried it.
N1: I can't remember why I gave up on this one.
Mutt: I love command line tools and think of arcane setup processes as fun weekend projects. My .vimrc is multiple hundreds of lines long. Configuring mutt defeated me. Also lack of HTML email support is a bit of an issue, sad as it is that people are sending HTML emails in the first place.

Sean Wood • Feb 16 '18

Thanks for this! The original reason for switching from whatever I had before to Inbox was for the snoozing feature. Looks as thought N1 has this as well. I used N1 a while back, but it was in early development and not 100% stable.

Thunderbird takes me back to Linux days (I'm a converted Apple user now) and it was great but clunky, as you said. Same idea for Sylpheed.

I would avoid apple Mail simply because I'm in that Android Phone/Macbook situation, and wouldn't mind something that is cross platform (not that many others are either).

Mutt... I mean, it's a novelty thing right? 😁

Ben Halpern • Feb 15 '18

For a really simple web-based UX, I enjoyed using Fastmail for a bit. We moved off of it as an org because it was a bit too annoying to sync with other Google stuff we were using, so we just settled for GMail through Google apps.

It may or may not fit your needs but I'll mention it for awareness.