For those who tried the beta and didn't like the lack of features (like me), it's now WAY better. I thought the beta was just a pretty face to gmail with limited features: only single account, can't access labels, etc, etc.
But now I took the leap and spent the $10 and I'm loving every second of it, especially the amazing integration with gmail shortcuts. Pretty much every shortcut works instantly and reliability, without the lag and wonkiness of the web interface.
After turning on gmail shortcuts, I've found it to be one of the most keyboard friendly apps I've ever used. And the beautiful UI is still there animating all your actions. Makes me feel like an email ninja.
seems fine so far. appears to do full downloads of messages. attachments aren't all downloaded, but previously downloaded attachments stay accessible unless you delete them.
sending while disconnected results in message being saved as a draft locally.
and there's this really cool activity window that shows exactly what it's doing: http://d.pr/CSVm
Why no love for Apple Mail? The only thing Apple Mail needed was the ability to have the preview pane on the right, which was made possible by this developer who created WideMail: http://widemailplugin.com/. No affiliation, and his site design is terrible, but the plugin works to a tee. I would share a screenshot, but it's a bit too much work to blur out and black out any sensitive information, which would pretty much result in the entire image being blurred out. But here's a basic screenshot I grabbed from the web: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1517499/widemail-thumb.jpg
Nah, even with the preview pane, it's still a world away in terms of presenting a beautiful, uncluttered interface, and just overall feel (stuff like supporting gmail shortcuts, synching reliably and effortlessly with gmail, understanding gmail's notion of "archive", just the right amount of preview in messages, &c).
Apple Mail was also, in my experience, really flaky. Sparrow has been pretty darn solid since a couple of betas ago.
You can see both sides of the conversation, and I prefer how a conversation is treated as a single entity. If I archive a conversation, all messages in that conversation are archived. And if a new reply to the conversation comes in, the entire conversation gets pushed back to my inbox.
Apple Mail's Organize by Thread feature is retarded. It considers any messages that have the same subject to be in the same thread.
Gmail's Conversations identify the actual threads/conversations instead.
I used to use LetterBox (does the same thing) but I still much prefer Sparrow — it's light, more modern, prettier, under more noticeably-active development… to list just a few reasons.
For me it’s Mail’s lack of native support for Gmail labels. It can organize emails into folders easily, but as far as I can tell, only one at a time. That makes me worried that when I sync with Gmail, my multiple labels for each email would be lost.
So I don't have to reply individually to all replies, I'm convinced to give Sparrow a go. I've never felt at a loss in Apple Mail, but I'm always willing to give a new product the chance to win me over.
I have to say, i've tried Postbox and Sparrow (and all the rest) and none really seem to fit my use -- power user plus, wants labels, clean views but also keyboard magic and speed.
I switched to mutt after finding myself in the same boat with most GUI clients. After writing a few save-hooks and macros (the hard part), I can check and process all of my accounts in a minute or two, even on a slow connection (great for vacations). Since I version control my ~/.mutt directory, it's easy to deploy on multiple machines. If I don't have access to mutt, my phone or webmail serves as an adequate backup.
I went ahead and bought it as I think it has a future and $10 is a good price point. But...
I just can't use it yet because in the list view the sender is emphasized more than the subject. That's completely backwards for me as I rarely get emails with the same subject but I get a lot of mail from the same small group of people. This causes me to just stare at the inbox without having a good overview of what I'm looking at. Here's my feedback idea if anyone wants to help push this forward:
Agreed. I saw Sparrow highly touted by friends on Twitter, but I couldn't wrap my head around it. But maybe because it reminded me of Twitter for Mac, which I can't wrap my head around either.
The new Postbox release is pretty solid and does almost everything I want.
It just saddens me that it's basically the future now and we still can't seem to get email clients that don't suck. Some are better than others, sure, but they all seem to suck in some fundamental way. FWIW, in Postbox it seems to be speed.
>they all seem to suck in some fundamental way. FWIW, in Postbox it seems to be speed.
That's because Postbox is based on Thunderbird, which is not a path to creating a fast, lightweight mail app.
I can only think of a handful of desktop mail engines for the Mac (Mail.app, Thunderbird + children, Entourage, Sparrow). If mail clients suck, it's because more people need to write one.
Outlook for Mac 2011 came out. It has some major missing features (won't run rules on the Exchange server, no auto-archive), but the calendar works and it's a serviceable mail reader. Better than Entourage by far, I would say.
So did I. Really liked it until banner ads start to appear in the most visually disruptive place in the entire interface. If those have been stripped from the paid version, I'd go back.
The ads really were in a terrible place for the email experience. I almost stopped using it as well until I found a setting in the preferences that just said "Disable Ads" and that was that.
Because of that, I assume that they've removed the Ads from the paid version.
who'd have thought that by now, email clients are not a done-deal. It's awesome to see people still bringing out thick mail clients and people liking them. A few years back everyone rushed to move apps to the web for no-install and no-version problems, now we seem to be swinging back to thick-clients, until people once again realize the challenges of such. As the landscape changes and software distribution improves (for example the app store) it once again opens up the door to new clients.
If you've ever lost access to Google, you'll never rely only on webmail again. There is absolutely no way to get in touch with a responsive human there. You may mysteriously get access back after a few weeks. Or maybe not. In the meantime, their online "help forms" will direct you to other forms, none of which provide any indication about what to do in cases when Google has erred.
I'm amazed we're still paying for email clients - I have no issues with Gmail, so I don't plan on buying this, but I am intrigued by so many people being in love with it.
I'm unaware of free options that work wonderfully. Or paid, but I haven't tried as many of those.
Gmail is online only, though yes, it's very good. I need offline, and I have 7 active accounts; Gmail online isn't a complete solution by any means.
Apple Mail has poor / nonexisting IMAP subscription, and few power-user tools, though it's my favorite desktop client so far. Fast with thousands of emails and 7 accounts, accurate searches across tons of data, integration with OSX's Address Book, and the worst plugin API in existence: existing, but entirely undocumented.
Thunderbird is a load of crap. I really, truly want to like it, but it always leaves a bitter taste, despite being one of the better clients overall. It continually chews on nothing until I kill it, preventing any updates to the account it's spinning on. It slows to a crawl on a mere few-thousand emails. Is far slower to retrieve and display data than Mail (easily 5x slower in the best case). Hinges privacy / security decisions on the wrong data (I had spam recently with a display "from" of "Apple.com" - Thunderbird decided it was actually from Apple, and displayed all the images, despite coming from another source and being in my spam box). Doesn't integrate with OSX's address book, and its existing address book is simply a joke, an insult to their users.
Mutt / Sup I intend to look into more fully, but have a high learning curve (the Vims of email clients), and I want / need HTML email and don't recall if they handle such things well.
What other free ones would you suggest I try? I need OSX and Windows software, I'd love efficient tagging support, and intend to move to certificates for signatures / encryption (and every system I've encountered is beyond an inflexible-PITA for certificates, almost all the way to totally ineffective).
Been using it for a couple months. Love it. I was using Postbox before, which was really nice but a little slow on my laptop.
I did switch back to Postbox after my first try with Sparrow, but I was sold when they added command-enter to send and the ability to remove the app icon from the dock. I wish Tweetie allowed menubar-only mode like that.
There is a 'Priority' label in the labels tab. I haven't personally used it so I can't confirm that it works as expected (my new email count is at 0), but it's there.
EDIT: Got a priority email after posting this. It didn't appear in the 'Priority' label window. womp womp.
it is seriously _not bad_. the web gmail interface has a lot more to offer though: integrated voice & video chat, google voice integration, calendar gadget/integration, and any 1 of the 30 or so labs i have enabled, to name a few.
still, it is very solid as _just_ an email client for gmail, and only $10.
Actually, one of the reasons I like Sparrow so much is that Google Chat isn't supported. I know I can just leave it turned off in the gmail interface, but if I'm ever bored and feel like seeing who's around it's too tempting to switch it on. With Sparrow I'm much more likely to get back to whatever I'm supposed to be doing after handling some email.
What about using a dedicated IM program like Adium? I find it leaps and bounds over using the web gChat client. Also it manages 1x MSN, 2x gChat and IRC in one place for me.
Can you explain what you mean by Google Voice integration? I'm a user of both GV and Gmail and I'm wondering if there is something I'm missing, like being able to see my GV texts/voicemails right inside Gmail or something?
I think what he meant was the ability to place calls through GV from GTalk (chat window). On a side note, Google's released a great Chrome extension for GV.
yes, i was referring to the ability to manage all communications from within gmail. i rely on email, gchat, and google voice to communicate with the world, all from 1 browser tab.
I've been using Sparrow for at least a couple of months now ("new"? Really?), and I'm very glad I switched from Mailplane. The minimally-obtrusive Tweetie 2 style interface really sold me on it.
I didn't know there was a paid version -- I'm using the free version with ads disabled. I'll glady pay up.
Their website is very slow responding, so maybe something isn't loaded, but I can't seem to find a trial download. The movie is nice, however for productivity software, unless I can try it for a day or two I'll never purchase.
Because they will still get revenue from impatient people like me who impulse buy it due to the fact that there isn't a non-mac-store copy available. ;)
I have been using the app since it was in early beta and it was and definitely is: flat-out awesome. I was a little surprised by their original price point (25), but at 10 dollars? No brainer.
I have to think that ultimately going with this price point will end up boosting their sales tenfold.
In a way, though, they just hacked the "debut at one price, then cut for a spike" model: They simply floated the idea of debuting at price A, and launched at price B. Which is pretty ingenious, as it essentially has the same Groupon-esque value psychology of the original model, but doesn't have the inverse effect on early adopters. Everyone's happy.
* search: the built-in one takes ages compared to remote search. I understand that it makes the search behaviour the same both locally and remotely, but its still a hassle to have really slow search locally.
* labels with archived items aren't shown in the sidebar. I'd like a reminder that there's unread mail in the mailinglists.
I have been using Sparrow since christmas and I really like it. On a large screen, Mail.app just does not look right.
Loving the gmail keyboard shortcuts. Seems like every app I like must be keyboard friendly now: From Things to The Hit List, from Mail.app to Sparrow, from Textmate to vim. I blame vim.
Keyboard navigation is too often overlooked in desktop apps. It should be in the very first release. A high percentage of early adopter-types are power users who want that kind of functionality. I can't tell you how many OS X Twitter clients I installed, only to promptly uninstall them (and never try them again) because I couldn't navigate them with the keyboard. The well thought out keyboard navigation was what sold me on Sparrow the moment I installed it.
Something about Sparrow just doesn't feel right. I can't quite put my finger on it but...well I think that's just it. Last I tried Sparrow it felt like I was using an iOS app within the iOS Simulator.
I did like the simple feel of it though and would be willing to buy it for anything less than $14 NZD.
Some elements depend on the size of your window, which, frankly, I like. I remarked on this because others have found the search not to be where they expect.
I recently started using Sparrow as a secondary app for other email accounts (like my company's support email address) so that it doesn't clog my normal inbox, but gives me the power of a native app running all the time. Actually its a perfect secondary mail client.
I was actually just trying the ad-supported Sparrow yesterday and earlier before this was posted. Great looking client imo but one thing I would have loved is a button to label and archive at the same time. Right now they only have a labeling button.
I went ahead and purchased it on impulse (a $9.99 price point makes that easy to do), but I probably won't be able to use it regularly until they add some sort of OmniFocus integration.
It's hard to say exactly why, but Sparrow seems to make it way easier for me to get to and stay at Inbox Zero. That's worth like a million dollars right there.
Sorry I let this go a little too long without checking it, but just in case...
The sparrow UI only shows one label in it's main list view, and then only the colour of said label. If you use labels to assist in scanning your inbox, then multiple labels on messages in your inbox increases their usefulness considerably.
In it's current state Sparrow obfuscates what i consider to be gmail's most valuable feature.
But now I took the leap and spent the $10 and I'm loving every second of it, especially the amazing integration with gmail shortcuts. Pretty much every shortcut works instantly and reliability, without the lag and wonkiness of the web interface.
After turning on gmail shortcuts, I've found it to be one of the most keyboard friendly apps I've ever used. And the beautiful UI is still there animating all your actions. Makes me feel like an email ninja.