On May 1st, Joe Kissel delighted Mac nerds who have specific email requirements by announcing the launch of MailMaven, a power-user-focused email application for the Mac that extends SmallCubed’s dedication to managing email on the Mac.

I’ve been test driving MailMaven since the public beta release; today, I plunked down the digital equivalent of 45 USD for a license after a generous trial period. I have a 67% increase next year to look forward to should I choose to continue to use MailMaven. I’ve enjoyed the beta so much that I wanted to go for it.

Smart Folders

The first feature I look for in an email client is Smart Folders: they are how I set up my email clients in my own particular preference, which I’ve written about before. A quick summary of how I manage email:

• A folder showing today’s inbox contents;
• A folder showing yesterday’s inbox;
• A folder showing this week’s inbox ;
• A folder showing last week’s inbox.

Once a message is archived or moved to another folder, it’s not something I see unless I search for it. I try to keep these folders pruned so older messages don’t pile up. It’s aspirational.

MailMaven supports Smart Folders. For my use case, I can create account-specific smart folders that fit the bill, so this checks off the Smart Folders Box for me. It too supports compound rules, so I am able to combine my iCloud and personal Gmail accounts into “home” smart folders, and then a separate set for work. I like it.

Review

MailMaven’s Review feature set is unique. It’s a list of enhanced saved searches, including all of your unread messages, and then a menu of recent emails, organized into received today, yesterday, this week, etc. As with project tagging, these are monolithic smart folders that don’t make any distinction between accounts. You can certainly create your own smart folders to fit your use case.

A clever twist in the Review section of MailMaven’s feature set is the eponymous “review” folder. You can tag messages for review at a later date you specify, and even organize messages by those for which you are awaiting a reply.

You can set a review date to a message in MailMaven; you pick a date, which supports natural language, so you can assign a review date and it will appear in the Review pane. Here, a Smart Folder like setup presents your email grouped by Today, tomorrow, past due, future, and more. It’s ambitious–and evidently in progress.

Tagging

MailMaven offers tagging as well. I can set keywords and flags to messages, which isn’t terribly new in the world of email. An interesting feature, though is its integration with OmniFocus and Things. MailMaven will read your projects from either (or both) apps and allows you to tag messages with a project. This doesn’t write any data to OmniFocus, in my case, but you can view your email correspondence by project, which can come in handy. My gripe about this right now is that, in MailMaven, all of the projects are in a list, and if you have a lot of projects, it’s not easy to scan, and I can’t tell what order they appear in. I’m looking forward to this feature’s evolution.

Whereas apps like Spark and MailMate will send a message to OmniFocus, MailMaven takes a more Outlook-like approach to project management. Once enabled in the Tags section of MailMaven’s settings, MailMaven will import the names of your OmniFocus projects. Associating a message or messages will then be tagged with the project name. You can then review your email in MailMaven organized by project, which is a tremendous affordance.

I like this feature (and find myself using it daily) but wonder about its direction. I review projects in OmniFocus, so I like everything associated with the project to be in OmniFocus or at least linked using notes and HookMark. So this is a different style of interaction. However, when I need to find an email associated with a project, I have found myself browsing in the project view instead of searching reactively.

Notifications and Focus Modes

MailMaven doesn’t currently support macOS’s Focus Modes; I was hoping it would, as Mimestream and Spark both allow me to use a monolithic email client but filter notifications for for work and home, as appropriate to where I am and what time it is. This isn’t on their roadmap for the app, either, although it’s a popular feature request.

Performance

I can’t be picky with a beta version, but MailMaven feels pretty slow compared to MailMate, Mimestream, and Mail. MailMate and Mimestream are focused in a way MailMaven isn’t, to be fair: the former is IMAP only, while Mimestream is (currently) a Gmail client, while MailMaven supports multiple protocols. MailMaven is, however, more expensive (after the first year) for new subscribers than either of those applications, so as the app develops, I’m hoping to see that it can be multi-protocol and fast.

Search

MailMaven opens a separate window for search, which isn’t expected behavior, but it has its merits. I don’t like it as much as I like search in MailMate, but it is a more directive version of search and so is friendlier to newer users. It’s much slower than MailMate in my usage, but it’s also capable of trawling multiple accounts, and also not restricted to a local mailbox in the way that MailMate works. MailMaven has cues in the UI to help you focus your search.

Conversation Panel

In the same way that MailMaven’s search happens in a second window, there is a Conversation Panel that shows your conversation threads. This is perfect for users like me, who prefer to see a straight list of messages organized by when they hit my inbox, rather than comb through a threaded list.

On larger displays, you can simply leave this window open, which is how I discovered the feature: I plugged my laptop into a 27” display at my desk at work, and I toggled it open by accident. In a situation such as this, there’s enough screen real estate to leave it open all the time, and I just love being able to glance up and see the thread. And at home, on my 32” Samsung, there’s plenty of room for both the main application window and the Conversation Panel.

This does not work as well on a MacBook. On a 13” inch display, you want every bit of screen real estate available for the app proper. I attribute my long laptop-only existence to why it took me so long to go back to using apps in windowed mode on the Mac, and why the iPad never seriously bothered me for its lack of Macness.

In the spirit of writing is thinking, I like a desktop set up hands down.

Clicking on a message will show you the conversation history, but you needn’t cruft up your main application window with this if you don’t need it. I’ve always resisted threaded views because they complicate the messages list. So while I might switch to the conversation view in MailMate, for example, to find a message, I never keep that layout. MailMaven’s Conversation Panel obviates this decision entirely.

https://mailmaven.app/support/articles/conversations.html

Two Views: Snippets and Table

MailMaven supports two viewing modes: “Snippets” and Table View. The Snippets view looks like Mail or many other mail applications: A list of messages, with a preview (you can set the number of lines from zero to 4) in a central column, with the message itself appearing in the right pane. It’s fine, and conventional, but it’s not my preferred view.

Table view arranges your mail messages as a tight list in the main viewing pane, and shows a preview below this list. This look, too, should be familiar to anyone who grew up using an email application before the days when computer displays were widescreen.

My particular preference in MailMate is to turn off the preview pane completely (two-pane view) so that I can only see the table list of messages. Because I use smart folders so heavily, this makes the day’s email obligation look shorter. MailMaven, as of version one, will not support turning off the preview pane (I emailed SmallCubed, and they said that they are planning a feature in a future version, but not version one). This is due to the fact that the messages controls are attached to the message window, which makes sense.

Favorites

Favorites in MailMaven is a genius idea, but the one I understood last. You can add any inbox, folder, tag collection, Smart Folder, to Favorites and create your own email dashboard. Once I realized how useful this feature would be, I populated it with:

• My. Three email accounts’ inboxes
• Home and Work Today folders
• Anything I’ve flagged for followup
• Preferred Projects
• Today and Tomorrow’s Review folders

I live in this pane, even though its utility was lost on me at first. I generally work out of my Today Smart Mailbox in MailMate, but like Mail, the default behavior there is to show your account with discoverable subdirectories. In truth, I don’t usually need to see that arborescent list as I work; I’m usually looking at today’s input, and I search if I need anything else. This favorites setup allows me to switch between today’s mail for both work and home accounts, see my most-used flag, and a few other views that I can use throughout the day. It’s pretty exciting.

The Final Word

MailMaven is an ambitious and opinionated email application. Version one of MailMaven doesn’t sport every feature that SmallCubed is planning. What hurts right now for me is the lack of more robust OmniFocus support and support for Hookmark. But the fundamental rethinking of an email application, in a landscape rife with free alternatives, is heartening and inspirational. For power users, it’s a must-try app. And a Mac-assed one at that.