Email on Mountain Lion

I just love my Macbook Pro.  But recently I have been struggling with Mail continually freezing up. The only thing I found was a suggestion from Apple to delete out emails from my Gmail accounts Really Apple, I have to delete email to make my Mail app work correctly? - this does not seem like a realistic option in this day and age.  And yes, I have cleared caches, rebuilt mailboxes and totally rebuilt the app from scratch to no avail.

So, I finally started looking at alternative mail apps.  I needed something that could talk to my Exchange account and handle two Gmail accounts without freezing up.  Turns out that was not as easy as I thought it would.  I spent a week or so going through app after app and thought I would share thoughts about the two winners of my research!

Postbox - while Postbox does not support Exchange, it does support Imap and I was able to connect to my Exchange account and add both my Gmail accounts.  I have been using Postbox for about a month now and I cannot believe how much my stress level has gone down.  No more sitting on the phone looking at the spinning beach ball waiting for Mail to let me look at an email that I needed to reply to a question on the phone!!  Postbox has some great features - Quick reply right from the email - why hasn't Mail ever had that feature?  And the ability to search just attachments!  I love that feature.  Postbox really has improved my life immensely!!  The only thing I don't love in Postbox is the Search feature - you have to use full words/names and hit enter to search.  Also, there is a strange little bug that would randomly change the sender on an email to one specific contact - not sure if I just had a corrupted database or if others have seen that too.  But it just takes a click on the Home button to fix.

So, you ask, if I love Postbox so much, why are there two winners?

Well, just today, Airmail announced that it had an update that added Exchange support.  Airmail is one slick app and just pretty to look at!  I had tried it a while back and really liked the app (enough to pay a few bucks for it) but I could never get my Exchange account to connect.  Well, today I fired it up, added Exchange and have used this app for the rest of the day.  It also has Quick Reply and the Search searches as you type.  I miss the attachment search but it is so speedy and efficient, I think I will stick with it for now.

You can't really go wrong with either of these apps.  They are not free but they are pretty cheap and well worth the investment.  If you are having trouble with Apple Mail, take the plunge and try something new - I know I am so glad I did!

UPDATE - still some issues with Exchange on Airmail so am back to Postbox but eagerly awaiting a fix from Airmail!