Fed up with Mac Mavericks Email (tagging, suggestions and more please!)

michaelah - two questions: Am I wrong on this - does MailPlane support iMap? Because I need my iCloud address. The other POP (dammit, they are POP accounts, not SMTP as in my post) I could filter through another gmail account. Second, do you do any mobile viewing?

I don't think IMAP is supported, unfortunately. For mobile I just use the Mail app on iPhone and look at the combined inbox when I need to.

Might be worth looking at http://freron.com as a replacement mail client.

I'm looking at: Airmail, Outlook, Postbox, MailMate, Inky and MailPlane - someone else must have done this sort of pro/intensive comparison before, right?

I use and can recommend Fastmail + Postbox. I have several addresses at Fastmail, and that's where I set up all the folders and filters. Then Postbox just shows me a nice tidy version of it all on my desktop, and thanks to IMAP my iPhone has the same view. If I wanted it to, Postbox could apply additional filters as it pulls email from Fastmail. I have a business email address, a personal address, and two newsletter signup addresses (one for general business newsletters and one for newsletters in my niche). I set up something like 17 folders in Fastmail for emails related to clients, products, prospects, travel, etc. Basic workflow: - Someone sends email to me. - Fastmail does an initial spam filter, which works very well. Then: - If the email is addressed to a newsletter address, it goes to one of the newsletter folders. - If it's addressed to my business or personal address, Fastmail checks the sender and content and sends it to the appropriate folder or, in the case of a few pests, discards it without me ever seeing it. Result: Only legitimate email from real people ends up in my in box. Automatic emails like receipts go immediately to their appropriate folder. Newslettery stuff is automatically filed where I can read it at my leisure. I don't see a way to tag emails in either program, but I can flag emails in Fastmail and they show up as flagged in Postbox. I rely on folders for sorting and prioritizing. One feature I love in Postbox is the keyboard shortcuts to move messages to another folder. I won't use Gmail because I have a business and don't trust Google. I gave up on Apple Mail because it kept choking and I like the keyboard shortcuts in Postbox. Fastmail has had a couple of hiccups over the (many) years but it has worked better than anything else I've tried.

I have a very very similar workflow to yours, and a similar number of email accounts -- but I do it just using mail's rules to sort everything out into the appropriate mailboxes... Rules can move items into mailboxes, color them, or tag them (sort of: if you use the "mark as flagged" option in a rule you get a choice of seven flag colors, which you can use to filter items into smart mailboxes if you need to). My one minor gripe is that the spam filtering isn't quite robust enough -- I used to use http://c-command.com/spamsieve/ as an add-on, stopped at some point when an OS upgrade broke it, and never bothered setting it up again (though I see now they have Mavericks support, I may have to give it another try...) It sounds like your main problem is with the "mailtags" plugin rather than with mail itself, and as far as I can tell from your description there doesn't seem to be any reason you need to be using the plugin. Can you clarify what about Mail's rules weren't sufficient for your needs?

Also have a look at MailPilot - it's one of those inbox zero apps. It will work with gmail/imap and pop. I'd move to MailPilot, but I anticipate that mailbox.app will comeout with a desktop tool eventually - so until then I use mailbox.app on ios and gmail in the browser (I like the tabs in the gmail client when I take a weekend off.)

Whoops - I'm wrong about mailpilot supporting POP. It's still a good product though.

Let's add in - needs to have integration with OSX address book...