One of the interesting news items of the past week was that Apple became the first US corporation to achieve a $1 trillion value. That’s good news, I guess. I mean, that means this family has made a bunch of money off of our Apple stock. But I always tend to be the odd man out. Apple is making more money by producing shittier and shittier hardware and software products. Sadly, they stopped leading in leap-frog innovation years ago. Now they just iterate small incremental improvements they tout as monumental leaps forward when they are not.
I’ve been an Apple fanboy since way before it was ever cool to be one. I’ve watched them make huge mistakes through the years. I’ve grown nauseous over the marketing hyperbole. But they have produced some amazing stuff. However, I’ve also watched the quality of their products wane substantially: software that has serious problems and loses features (sometimes is completely discontinued without warning), hardware that is more a product of cost cutting and less about the user experience they once held sacrosanct. I could produce numerous examples, but instead of writing a negative post, I want to focus on something positive.
AirMail 3
For over a year now, I’ve had nothing but problems with my iCloud-based email and the Apple Mail client. For over a year now, Apple has been either unwilling or unable to fix these maddening problems. (I suspect they are clueless as to why it doesn’t work properly.)
I vividly recall Steve Jobs touting how iCloud was going to be so much better than anything they had ever done before in the cloud. He even joked something like, “I know: Why should you trust the people that gave you .Mac and MobileMe?!” Well, indeed!
More and more I eschew Apple’s software products1 . I have just ditched Apple’s Mail app. It is riddled with issues. I am now using AirMail 3 on my Mac desktop and my iOS devices.
AirMail has not only utterly solved the enraging iCloud account issues I’ve suffered with using Mail for over a year now, it is also astonishingly customizable. It offers features you would expect to find, but don’t in Apple’s Mail app.
You can:
- Bounce email which I have almost always found to be a great strategy to fight spam and unsolicited marketing emails2
- Easily filter your emails on a variety of parameters
- Easily unsubscribe from unwanted subscriptions
- Easily block email from senders who refuse to honor your requests to unsubscribe from their automated marketing3
- Snooze an email to have it “arrive” in your inbox later so you won’t forget it
- Apply labels to emails
- Convert an email to a To Do item
- Send an email’s contents to any number of other services such as Deliveries, Calendar, Text editors, Journals
- Schedule sending your reply
- And a host of other features4 ! But the best part is that, unlike Apple’s products, “it just works!”–you know, the way Apple’s over-priced junk did once upon a time.
If you just want the basics, that’s rather straight-forward and self-evident in AirMail 3. Admittedly, if you want to finely hone your email skills, learning to harness the power of AirMail 3 takes a little time investment, but I think it’s very worth that small amount of effort.
I’ve dropped Photos. It’s a train wreck. Replaced it with Adobe Lightroom. It works vastly better. I’ve dropped Apple’s Aperture. Oh, They discontinued it without warning. My bad. I recently got a family account with Spotify instead of Apple Music. The list goes on… ↩
Once upon a time this could be done in Apple’s Mail app. ↩
No more writing special rules. Just “Click” in AirMail. ↩
Seriously, this is not even half! ↩