Canary Mail App 4+

Colour me cautiously impressed!

Update:
Normally I would take up this concern directly with the developers, but I can't find a direct e-mail address; the support page tells me I must be a Pro user to "submit a request". I've discovered that Canary Mail doesn't always find e-mails (even after reindexing), which is a bit disconcerting. This does put a big question-mark over the app, and has caused me to deduct a star – and to contemplate deducting two. A pity, because in most other respects it's superb.

I've only just started evaluating Canary Mail, as a possible alternative to Airmail (flawed since upgrade to 4.0, IMHO). And so far, I've been rather impressed. It's very easy to grasp, with a lovely, minimalist interface (that nevertheless has lots of interesting functions just under the surface, where you can easily familiarise yourself with them). And it's very quick. Plus it's got some great features (encryption, snooze, pinning, file listing, contact listing etc.). The only thing I haven't found is the "kanban-style internal to-do list" mentioned in one of the developer responses, but maybe the recent rewriting of the app removed that feature? I don't need it, as it happens, and if Canary Mail continues to perform as well as it does at the moment (with just two accounts), I shall transfer my other e-mail accounts as well (10 of them in total). Here's hoping!

Stylish but lacks some functionality and support poor

After Microsoft technical Support nearly broke my iMac with their horrendous "assistance" trying to sort issues with my Outlook account (that was never resolved), I decided to try and seek an alternative for Outlook I could use on my iMac, from my home office.

Having done some on-line research, I liked what I was reading in the reviews of Canary, so thought I would give it a go. As I work in healthcare, and sometime need to email to colleagues and external healthcare organisations patient sensitive data, I particularly liked the intergrated encryption functionality. The design is sleek and very "Mac" like, and like most things Mac, when trying to configure the system (like set up a new folder within an email account), you follow the way it would normally be done on a mac, and mostly thats the right way.

One major grip though is with regards to trying to send emails with attachments - anything above 1MB and it just sits in the outbox and won't send. I sent an email to support, but its been over 24hrs and still no response - I appreciate its a new start up Indie platform, but I would expect a response within a working day, especially as I paid straight away for the full service.

Developer Response ,

Hi, please share your ticket # and we'll look into this for you.

Not really worth the asking price

Pros: It’s better than any of the other “alternative" email programs for the Mac, by way of not storing your emails on intermediary servers, not requiring a subscription, not getting suddenly discontinued with no notice, having some form of Exchange support, and not making a whole bunch of unnecessary folders on the server to support gimmicks like “postponing” mail. The user interface doesn’t completely grind to a halt when confronted with a large Inbox, unlike several other alternative email clients.

Cons: It only really does one thing that the built in Apple Mail client doesn’t (end-to-end encryption). It has the usual issues that the third-party email clients all seem to have of not fetching all mail, or suddenly forgetting the existence of all of my most recent emails and having to re-download them. It has the usual problem of creating a whole slew of draft emails in IMAP accounts which have to be manually deleted, even more so than Apple Mail. The search function is just as bad as, if not worse than, Apple Mail, which is a real shame because that was part of the reason why I bought it.

Summary: I didn’t enjoy using Canary any more than Apple Mail, despite the usual claims of being a more “modern” email experience. If you don’t need proper Exchange support and do need end-to-end encryption, it might be worth evaluating. Otherwise, there’s no compelling reason to bother trying Canary Mail.

Developer Response ,

Hi, here are some features that Canary has but Apple Mail doesn't:

-Read notifications
-Follow-up reminders
-Kanban-style in-app to-do list
-Bulk cleaner
-Snooze
-Unified inbox with focused view
-Email templates that sync between Mac and iOS
-Smart search eg 'PDFs from Bryan' or 'Photos from dad' or 'Receipt this week'
-Support for Gmail filters
-One-click Unsubscribe
-Integration with Dropbox, Google Drive etc to send large files
-Giphy integration to send GIFs

This of course, is apart from encryption and other security features Canary offers. Note also that you can disable autosaving of drafts.

Please reach out to support and we'll be happy to guide you on getting the best out of Canary.