Barnes TechApple Mail is a mess under load
I am a big fan of Google Workspace and Gmail in general. Once you get used to how Google manages email, it can really help you plow through email quickly and efficiently, particularly if you use keyboard shortcuts, and once you get used to how Labels work.
Plus, as a bonus, it’s not Microsoft! 😆
Years ago I was a fan of using Apple Mail both on iOS and macOS, but as the years went on and I got more email, it started choking all the time. New messages would stop coming through until I quit and re-launched the app, or maybe they would come through 15+ minutes after they actually came through. It also just always fought with how Google does things, and I got tired of it.
I primarily went to using Chrome and had Gmail in a pinned tab. It worked much better than Apple Mail, but it didn’t have native notifications or anything like that, so it was… fine.
I tried Superhuman for a few months, and it had a lot of advantages. I could go even faster through email, and their iOS app was WAY better than Google’s for organizing mail, but it is very pricey.
Mimestream
I signed up for the beta of Mimestream almost 2 years ago, and it has been making steady progress ever since then. Honestly the whole time I’ve used it in beta, it has been rock solid. There was one release (which I believe was actually a change macOS made) that crashed the app periodically, but they fixed that within a day.
On May 22, the 1.0 version was announced, and I’m extremely happy with it.
I expected once they launched 1.0 that it would essentially be saying “this is stable enough now that we feel comfortable charging for it and supporting it” but of course they added several new features as part of 1.0.
Here is the blog post announcing it, along with the new 1.0 features -
I always enjoyed the aesthetics of Apple Mail, I just couldn’t reliably use it. Mimestream to me combines the best of Apple Mail, but uses modern Google API’s to directly talk to Google rather than using IMAP, which is always a bit flaky, and not that secure by modern standards. The result is a MUCH faster, solid way to connect to Google mail accounts. Since it is integrating with Google, they added other Google API integrations such as Contacts, Calendar, and as part of 1.0 you can now integrate with several Google settings directly as well.
Direct Google integration allows for things like server-side filters / mail rules, vacation settings, and more. This means you can set those in Mimestream, but unlike Apple mail, they will work on messages no matter when they come in, and whether or not your computer is online at the moment, which is fantastic. Additionally, whatever you have your signature set to in Gmail, it will automatically show up in Mimestream and vice versa. Trying to do this in Apple Mail is… not easy, and pretty fragile.
Another feature that is a game changer for me is that you can choose whether you want to use the same keyboard shortcuts Apple Mail uses, or you can use the same ones Gmail uses. Years ago I was used to the Apple ones but in the years since then I have become completely used to the Gmail keyboard shortcuts. It would be very difficult to unlearn that muscle memory at this point, and I can’t sort email nearly as efficiently without keyboard shortcuts.
I think Mimestream is the perfect combination of being all the benefits of being a native Mac-Assed Mac App, as well as the benefits of a truly great web service (which Apple is not great at).
Price
The price may be a sticking point for some people, but so much of my professional life relies on email that it was a no brainer for me. It’s either $5 a month or $50 per year, but there’s a 40% discount for the first year as a launch special. For me I am thrilled to pay it. I want to support the development of amazing apps like this and I know they have big future plans for this, including an iOS app which I’m really looking forward to.
Here’s an article over on TidBITS that goes through why they like Mimestream and a lot more detail about the app itself -