For a number of years we have been working on MailMaven: A new macOS email client that picks up where we left off after Apple killed Mail Plugins.
Today we are opening access to a wider audience than our small group of private beta testers.
Apple made it impossible for MailTags (and SmallCubed’s other plug-ins) to keep working with Mail, and the Mail extensions API remains quite limited, so they wrote a whole new mail client. It’s $75 for one year of updates, with the first year currently discounted to $45 and more discounts if you had already purchased their other products. SpamSieve integration is built-in, and MailMaven really lets you customize how spam messages are handled.
Through six editions of Take Control of Apple Mail, the current title, I said that I used Mail because—and this qualification is crucial—with a long list of customizations and, in particular, the addition of the MailSuite plugin from SmallCubed, it was the best Mac email client I could find (and I’ve tried pretty much all of them). MailSuite added essential filing, automation, and tagging features that made Mail bearable. On its own, however, Mail is so-so at best, and it has been getting progressively worse for a number of years.
[…]
If you used Mail along with the MailSuite plugin in the past, you can picture that combination as a very rough approximation of MailMaven. If you’re unfamiliar with MailSuite, here’s a quick summary of some of its main features that have migrated into MailMaven[…]
[…]
If you’re the sort of person who loves tweaking things and squeals with delight every time you uncover another checkbox in Settings, you’ll be thrilled. Every aspect of the windows and message display, every keyboard shortcut, tweaky attachment options, and even the color, shape, and position of the unread message badge on the icon can be adjusted to your heart’s content.
However, AppleScript support is currently very limited. You cannot get the selected messages, and most of the message properties don’t work.
One of the interesting design decisions is that searching happens in a separate window rather than just filtering what’s displayed in the main window. This was more common pre-iTunes. MailMaven can automatically set the search scope based on what you were looking at, so this doesn’t really add any extra steps. On the plus side, I like being able to easily open multiple searches at once and to adjust the view options to explore the search results without disturbing the view settings for the main window. On the other hand, sometimes it would be handy to be able to just quickly filter the current display in situ [Update: This feature already exists.].
(Apple Mail does make it easy to create new viewer windows, which would seem to offer the best of both worlds. But it’s awkward because new windows don’t retain the context of which mailboxes you had selected. Recent versions of Mail are kind of the worst of both worlds because starting a new search in the existing window no longer filters the current mailbox, either—it jumps you to an All Mailboxes view.)
We’ve toyed with the taglines:an email client for people who remember what email clients are supposed to be like.
An email client for people who think email client should be email clients.
In other words words, it’s not trying to reinvent e-mail, you don’t give their server access to your mail, and they’re not sprinkling AI everywhere. I also appreciate the old school release notes that actually tell you what the changes were. They are also open about the known issues and roadmap.
Previously:
