Any e-mail client with additional grouping functionality on Mac OS X?

Question

I'm very unhappy with my mail experience. I'm receiving a lot of mails from various clients and projects and need a way to better organize them. I would really love to have additional grouping-functionality with the e-mail client. Currently I'm using Mac OS X's Mail.app, but I am not bound to this. So I am open to any Mail.app-plugin or independent mail application commercial or not for Mac OS X -- should support IMAP, though -- but I think this should not be a problem nowadays? With Mail.app i'm doing the following:

• group by thread
• sort by datetime descending

What I would love to have is not only additional tagging-functionality for e-mails -- I know, that at least thunderbird and postbox support them. I would love to have some additional grouping functionality for these tags -- inside the main mail window.

So maybe I can summarize the important points:

• "native" Mac OS X mail client (no web-mailer please)
• automatic-tagging functionality (eg.: auto-apply tags by some kind of filter)
• easy access to tagged mails

Easy access to tagged mails:

• I would really love to have some additional grouping functionality in the mail folders. The mail application should put all tagged mails in a group -- the groups should be sorted by last received e-mail. Inside the group I would still like to have the possiblity to group by thread.

or

• It would be ok to have a list of tags (topics) on the left pane of the mail client. For example postbox: There is the 'accounts-section', there is the 'folders-section' -- but why is there no 'topics-section'?

Answer 1

Sounds like a job for MailTags and the Mail Application's Smart Mailboxes feature.

Answer 2

With OSX mail you can do more than you are doing using folders and rules.

You can create rules that move mails to different folders - these give you the tagged emails in a group.

Answer 3

Thunderbird will allow you to

• Add tags to a message with a filter
• Move/copy messages with certain tags to a folder (what you refer to a group above)
• Filter your inbox (or any folder) by tag

Answer 4

Thunderbird is my suggestion. Reason?

1. Opensource
2. tabbed interface
3. Gmail type conversation view
4. tagging
5. filters
6. extensions and addons (rocks!)

Answer 5

The good: Microsoft Entourage (part of Office for Mac) will do everything you want, and then some.

The bad: It's Microsoft Entourage, and part of Office for Mac.

The ugly: Office 2011 for Mac (due this Autumn) is replacing Entourage with a new mail/contact/calendar app, Outlook (yeah, I know, but it's new for the Mac…).

Answer 6

Currently in beta: sparrow, an OS X interface for Gmail (and IMAP support in future releases). I've not used it, but if Gmail would fit your requirements, then maybe the sparrow features gives you the native OS X look & feel you want.

It seems this is ad-supported, but those apparently can be disabled. I've no idea if this will be free after the betas. I've read it will be available in the new Mac App Store.