A better email client for the Mac?

But is it any good?

When I last used it, there was some very weird behaviour with handling Sent mail, and the flags (read/unread, etc) weren't accessible. Has this changed?

Can anyone englighten me as to how the native mnail client on OSX is bad? It does everything I need it to do for me and more and I couldn't imagine using anything else.

Hmm, maybe i should check that one out too. It had some neat tricks for handling mailing lists, which is good. Only trouble at least for this grumpy old fart is that it seems to have a massive learning curve if you want to use the advanced features of the client. I am definitely no good at programming whatsoever, even Workflow for iOs goes way, way, way over my head so i wonder how much of Mail mate i'd understand. Where do i get it by the way?

I guess i want to ask how much of the low level customization you need, which of course isn't an easy question but i do not want to hack anything if i can avoid it because that would probably end up a disaster.

So as the subject line says, are we talking apple scripting here? I'm sorry to ask so many stupid questions, i guess what it all boils down to in the end is that i want to try out Mailmate but am afraid i will not understand it at all. It seems very geeky to me but i could be wrong.

Apple mail is painful.

Do you need to manage multiplwe accounts? Well, get prepared to VO left and right thousands of times to get where you want.
Do you need to read liong e-mails? So sorry for you my old mate ....
Need to access quickly attachments? Good luck, bilieve me yiou will need it a lot.

The interface to voiceover is confused, cluttered, slow. The whole thing is a fail.
Using conversation? Go through a slow and painful suffering while you hear that bla bla triangle colapsed while you just want to listen quickly to the conversation subject because you really have more interesting things to do than loosing your short time hearing that verbose thing.

It'd be much better if there were thre groups
One with a treeview with each root node being one account and each children nodes being the folders (inbox, bla bla).
Another with the current conversation list.
Inside of this conversations would render as "unread subhject x messages unread of x messages in conversation".
Third one with preview and search related features.
Tab key or vo left and right moving from one to the other group.
Messages infull window showing using anything VO can render well, if there is such an interface. If iPhone renders it well Mac should have a way of doing that. Using webviews? Well we can dream.
Links rendered as ........ links and attachments rendering either as links or as a list of files.

Strangely Apple has a way of doing things that are inversely proporsional in Mac and IOS: the easier it is in IOS the harder it is on Mac for whatever reazon.
These days I use an external keyboard amd IOS mail client as my main mail system. The interface is not what I talk above but is much more usable than Mac's mail.

After having looked at Mailmate i can only say that i now flinch from the notion that i must check my mails every once in a while. Where, how, what?
There are in principle 2 things in Mailmate that really is incompatible with my workflow when reading mail: 1, you have no way at all of knowing where there are new mails if you don't skip the nice stuff alltogether and read mail the traditional way, but then what's the point of all the snazzy smart mailboxes? Not anywhere in the messages table can you see how many messages there are in your mailbox like in Apple mail where it clearly states that there are X number of messages in the mailbox and no, i shouldn't have to do a vo+f2 only to see how many messages there are, talk about clumsy and tedious. Unless anyone can help me out with this problem, i'll consider this thing alone a deal breaker.
2, this isn't such a biggy after all but quite annoying when you're used to the kind of automatic reading that Mail provides: the mail isn't read automatically when you open a mail in Mailmate.
And for those talking about unnecessary info being read in Mail such as "disclosure triangle collapsed" and so on, how about this gathered from Mailmates messages table when reading with voiceover: "Replacement character for object None, replacement character for object Unread" and so on.
Having said this though, there's much with Mailmate i like: The precise filtering where you can get down to very tiny details making sure your rules are very exact, the fact that mailing lists get their own smart folders without you having to do anything to get to them and edit them and the load of keyboard shortcuts plus the fact that Mailmate supports or will support openPGP natively. If only i could see how many messages are in a folder i select without having to push extra keys or hacking PList files that probably would break anyway if i as much as touch them, this would be a really good mail client. And while i'm at it can i collapse threads and know how many messages are in a thread before i delete it?

I did not play with other mail clients on Mac but the fact that they do not behave reazonably with VO does not mean Apple mail does. Based on your findings I wouldn't consider neither options acessible.
May be outlook 2016 will do the trick for you. I need to check it out but the outlook interface on Windows is a dream. If it keeps the way it is also on Mac it would be great.

I spoke to the author of Mailmate and he confirms that Voiceover doesn't read message counts either in the threads nor in the message window. He said that message counts in threads wasn't there at all but if he would consider it it should be working for VO as well. Regarding my workflow i find that it's much slower in Mailmate so if the guy who posted about it here would like to tell me how he uses Mailmate i'd be happy to hear because as i said in my earlier post there are things i much like to do that's not available in the standard mail client but at least for me, working with Mailmate is more time consuming than it should be, but then maybe i'm just plain old stupid, wouldn't surprice me.

I have two problems with apple mail, ever since os 10.9, it takes forever for apple mail to retrieve my mail from my gmail account. Also, apple mail has never had read receipts, I want something where I can have read receipts sent, I'm hoping malemute does this.