That’s a good good question. My answer for now is:
- I tried moving to Airmail a year or two ago. It was an unsatisfactory program (don’t remember the reasons), it was a lot of work to migrate there and then a lot of work to migrate back. I almost certainly lost mail in the process. I don’t want another big migration effort that might be for nothing again: actually, worse than nothing
- My email database is 36GB. That means every significant operation can take hours or days. At the point, I’ll settle for a good Apple Mail experience over a potentially great experience using some other app or approach
- The only other desktop email app I know much about is Microsoft Outlook. Even if it turned out to solve my big gripes about Apple Mail (slowness, vagueness), it’s not an app I want to spend time in. I’ve used it at work for years. For me, it’s a chaotic, ugly environment. No thank you.
- Something tells me to stay away from the cloud as a storage location for a 35GB email database. My experiences in starting to clean up and organize my Mail data was complicated and slowed down considerably by the somewhat hidden presence of iCloud Drive. I’d rather keep it local and simple.
- I trust Apple Mail to be around well into the future more than I trust any non-Apple app to do so. It’s a gamble either way, but I’ll take the gamble with the slightly better odds
- I like staying in the Apple ecosystem for something like this. Just a gut feeling that the obstacles and irritations will be fewer. For example, I can freely copy/paste or drag/drop into and from my emails in this App. Once you get outside the Apple ecocystem, that is often a weak spot. I already know the irritation of extra steps for copy-paste when I use Outlook and Web Outlook on my work computers. Things I do often need to be, if not positively pleasant, at least not irritating.
- I do like the small type and tight spacing of Mail’s layouts
- Even if I moved to another app, I’d still have tons of purging and organizing to do. Who’s to say it would be significantly easier anywhere else. Might as well do the monster-sized work in an environment I know pretty well