I have bought a license for MailMate - a mail application for the Mac. This cost me AU$84. Why pay that kind of money for a mail app, when Apple provide Mail for free, and I have access to a good web app for Fastmail and Outlook for work email?
I was happy to pay the money because MailMate is excellent artisanal software that offers unparalleled features and power. That money also goes straight to the single developer who has committed to this app for years.
If you are looking for beautiful software, MailMate is not for you. If you are looking for simple software, MailMate is not for you. If you are looking for a Markdown-aware, IMAP-compatible, smart rule-centric email powerhouse, MailMate is for you.
Functional - not pretty.
Tell Me the Features
If you’re buying MailMate, you’re spending hard-earned dollars to get a mail app that does things that other mail apps do not. From my perspective, these are the features that I got for my money:
Markdown composer - MailMate lets you compose emails using Markdown, and simultaneously renders a preview of the HTML that will ultimately be sent. I’ve always preferred plain text email, mainly because composing HTML email is traditionally a clunky, error-prone affair. Not with MailMate and Markdown. MailMate generates clean HTML and doesn’t mangle previous HTML elements that might be within the chain of quoted history. I’ve used more bullets, bold text and headings in the last month than I have in the last 10 years.
Send Later - Included in the recipient header area is an optional field that accepts natural language input for expressing when an email should be sent. So go ahead, write those emails at 11pm at night, but be kind to your recipient and schedule them to be sent at 9am.
Custom Keybindings - MailMate is a good Mac citizen and features a full complement of keyboard shortcuts. The user can take this a step further by defining custom keybindings. I apply the FastMail web app shortcuts but you can just as easily add Gmail keybindings. This provides single-trigger actions to invoke common tasks.
Tagging - Going beyond flagging, the ability to tag emails with custom labels (including emoji 🙌🏻) adds a layer of workflow management to email. For instance, I have waiting for (🔃) and action (❗) tags that I apply to particular emails. Combining these with MailMate’s superpower - Smart Folders - unlocks further abilities.
Smart Folders - MailMate embraces smart folders. These represent on-demand searches of your entire email archive. The app encourages these to be used as the primary interface to your email, to the point where I keep my IMAP folders tucked away, and instead rely on a series of smart folders to surface and hide email according to my needs. Combined with the aforementioned tagging, this can be great for showing, for example, emails that I’m waiting on a reply that are more than 2 weeks old. Your imagination is the limit for smart folders because the amount of searchable elements included is bonkers.
Filter to your heart’s content.
Custom columns and views - each view - whether a Smart Folder or a regular IMAP folder, can have its own view and columns displayed. This can be helpful in a Smart Folder to identify which IMAP folder the email in question actually lives in, or which email account it originated from. I like that it can also show the correspondents within the email exchange (not simply who it came from).
App integrations - MailMate is extensible which allows it to connect to third-party apps, such as OmniFocus, DEVONthink and BBEdit, among others.
Should I Bother?
If you have a Gmail account and generally use the web app or your phone to deal with email, no, you shouldn’t buy MailMate.
If you have multiple email accounts1, and you want to centralise your email world into a single location and benefit from the features I outlined above, then yes, you should buy MailMate.
Sure, but What Do Others Think?
There are two brilliant reviews out there that provide alternative impressions of MailMate:
“We Dedicate This To The Energy Of We – Greater Than Any One Of Us But Inside Each Of Us,” says the banner page of WeWork’s IPO document. I mentally added another “e” to We, and hastily moved on before I cracked up.
Sometimes it is perfectly appropriate to use toilet humour.
Work just provided me with an iPhone XR. Which means I’m on the Animoji bandwagon now. Watch out!
There’s a sense of spring in the air. Birds are chirping and we have a blue sky and a gentle breeze.
My wife’s iPhone XR was lost/stolen. Somehow Find My iPhone was disabled. How was this done with FaceID and passcode required for access? Carrier has blocked IMEI so it’s essentially a brick at this point, as best I can tell.
It seems I can’t spend any time on the Internet at the moment without coming across insights, thoughts and video on the philosophy of stoicism.
While this could be a product of frequency bias, I claim some modicum of defence because I learned about stoicism in detail in 2011 during my time studying at the Cranlana Colloquium.
I have enjoyed rediscovering and reminding myself of the stoic philosophy. It’s a mental model that makes sense to me and can help ward off the feeling of helplessness in a complex and not entirely well-functioning or well-governed world.
The Stoic Manifesto
Stoics attempt to be guided by logic and reason rather than fleeting worldly gratification. The practice of Stoicism supposedly allowed people to lead more peaceful, rational lives.
A Stoic and a… Romantic?
I appreciate the stoic’s view of the world, as long as it doesn’t veer too far into fatalism1. I’ve always favoured the concept of logical thought (i.e. Doctor Spock) ahead of irrational behaviour (i.e. Captain Kirk). Yet because I’m not Vulcan, I often fail to live up to the ideals of stoicism. Let’s call it a work in progress. When I prevail in taking the stoic approach I find myself less riddled with stress and anxiety, and am generally happier about my lot in life.
Boiling It Down
The easy 1, 2, 3 of stoicism may be presented as:
If you can change it, it doesn’t deserve your worry. Go ahead and make the change. Just do it!
If you can’t change it, it doesn’t deserve your worry. You can’t fix it, so why stress?2
If you worry about it anyway, you are simply inviting it to tyrannise and traumatise you, indefinitely. Rumination is the worst.
I don’t like the idea of stoicism being used as a argument in favour of ‘do nothing’ for monumental challenges, such as climate change. I can’t change the heating climate directly, but I can make active changes such as shopping smarter, flying less, and being generally responsible. Other individuals can do more, dependent on their position in society. It’s not a free pass to do nothing.↩︎
The Alfred E. Neuman approach: “What, me worry?”↩︎
My thanks to the flu which has enabled me to sleep night and day for the past three days. 😷
I’ve just bought and installed Better on macOS and iOS. I’ve used 1BlockerX until now, but I’m interested to see if this other app is, indeed, Better.
I’m nearing the end of my MailMate trial, and I think it’s going to be a case of “take my money”. It’s really good.
I’m experimenting with disabling Fastmail spam filtering, and instead using SpamSieve on my Mac.
This game was a lot of fun.
There are a few things I don’t like about MailMate but there are many things I do. I imagine I will end up buying a license at the end of my trial period.
Day One has embedded itself into my life. I’ve been writing in it since November 2011 and have over 1,500 entries. That must be the longest contiguous piece of work I’ve created.
Whenever you stumble upon an interesting thought on another site, write about it and link to it.
I stumbled across this article, and I liked it. It outlines why the IndieWeb should really just be the web.
As a result of finding this article on this website, I’ve subscribed to its RSS feed, so I’ll automatically get future content delivered to me. This is what makes the open web so great.
My iPad has been hit by that weird bug where Spotlight search slows to a crawl. After attempting random voodoo solutions, I’ve now gone for the nuclear erase and restore option.
Functional - not pretty.
Filter to your heart’s content.
