Review: Postbox, A Good Start On A New Email Client

The Postbox public beta was announced a couple of weeks ago, and since then I’ve been trying out the app to see how it compares with Apple’s own Mail.

Postbox is a mixed bag; there’s some things about it that are very appealing. Other features much less so. Let’s look at the positives first.

Postbox borrows a lot of ideas from web-based email services like Gmail. (Indeed, adding a Gmail account is super-easy.) It displays messages within the context of their conversations, as Gmail does. Personally I’m so used to this feature in Gmail that I now find it hard to view emails in any other way, so that’s a big plus for Postbox as far as I’m concerned.

Another feature borrowed from the web is tagging, which Postbox calls Topics. You can create as many topics as you wish and assign them to messages. It’s very like Gmail’s Labels feature.

It copes pretty well with multiple accounts and does a pretty good job of importing many thousands of messages from old accounts.

There are some problems, though. There’s so many features on offer that the UI is very cluttered, with panels and boxes and HUDs all over the place. It can get confusing even for experienced email users. Postbox is based on Mozilla’s Thunderbird code, and sometimes the Thunderbird can’t help poking its head out of the camouflage. As someone who tried the ‘Bird several times and was never able to get on with it, I found this disconcerting.

Overall though, I like what I see. Considering this is a beta, it’s surprisingly stable. It could become a serious rival for Mail, especially for people who deal with very large amounts of email every day.