[MlMt] Nervous about integration with my smartphone

[Marco Carmosino]

I completely agree with you. Using MailMate "spoils" any other desktop 
mail experience.

For my part, however, I've always used a fairly powerful desktop based 
email client, it was mutt (for years) before MailMate. I got an iPhone, 
and recognized that the email experience there is very limited. However, 
raw power is not necessarily what I want when I'm using email from my 
phone. I invariably want one of two things:

1. To search my email for a piece of information that I need right this 
instant

2. To glance at my inbox and see if anything is on fire

For "glancing", the built in mail client on the iPhone is OK, and apps 
like Triage and Dispatch are rather good. When I'm at my desk I use the 
features of my mail client to keep the INBOX folder pretty clear of 
meaningless stuff, so glancing at it on the iPhone before I do my daily 
purge in MailMate (previously, mutt) is actually pretty informative as 
stuff comes in through the day.

For "immediate fact finding", the full-text search in Mail on the iPhone 
is passable, I'm pretty sure it just uses IMAP SEARCH with fairly stupid 
arguments, and I have a good IMAP provider so that works out well. 
Unfortunately, there's nothing on the iPhone that supports searching 
based on IMAP keywords (to my knowledge), and I make heavy use of 
keywords to tag and organize my mail.

I mitigate the issues with search by trying to break important 
information out of email into Omnifocus or synced notes, but of course 
I'm not perfect about this.

The point of this long and rambling account is that I think the 
objectives of using email on a phone vs. on a desktop are so different, 
that it mostly doesn't matter that the phone mail clients are so 
feature-impoverished vs. MailMate.

In a perfect world, there'd be a great app on the iPhone that ONLY 
searches mail and takes into account folders, keywords, flags, people, 
etc in a smart way. In this world, you can pretty much get by with the 
builtin client for information-seeking, and there are actually *good* 
options for "glancing" at email coming in to decide if you need to do 
something right now.

I think a phone is a complement to a desktop app. I think it should not 
attempt to achieve feature parity.

best,

-- Marco

On 28 Feb 2015, at 20:10, Sparky Doosan wrote:

> Hey I hope it's OK to share thoughts and feelings, LOL. TBH I haven't 
> used a local mail client for a long, long time. Something changed 
> recently that I think is making me want to bail on the browser-based 
> experience and instead start rebuilding and flexing the powerful 
> muscles that come from a local client -- MailMate looks a winner!
>
> But all that said, I confess I'm nervous. My experience in the past, 
> maybe it sounds familiar to somebody, is that the mail handling on my 
> local computer will become such a part of normal workflows... using 
> anything else will shortly be entirely unsatisfactory.
>
> In the form of a question, do you use both MailMate and also some IMAP 
> thing from your smartphone? I'm not really concerned about a quick 
> check-in on someone else's computer and browser... I just want to 
> integrate my computer and my phone, and don't think MailMate provides 
> a one-stop answer(?). If you've solved this concern please tell me 
> (us) how you did it?
>
> Thanks!
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