Yeah, mail.app is performant, updated, and native.

It ain’t outlook if you need that level of Corp crap but it does well with my massive mess of email from 2002 onwards over various hosting and forwards and works well with gmail.

I cannot understand why it does not allow to autocomplete the destination folder when one moves a message, you have to rely on the "predicted" folder or just use the mouse.

I found Mail.app to be very quick to use, especially with Mail Act-On which gave me tons of filtering and best of all, hotkeys that made moving, archiving and applying any number of rules super easy.

The price has gone up a fair bit since I had to move away from Mac, so I don't know if the value proposition is still there, but I know it saved me hours of time...

Thunderbird is the closest to productive I've gotten on Windows since, but I want those hotkeys!

You know, I've never tried it. I was looking for a cross-platform solution, but I haven't run anything but Mac for a couple of years now. Perhaps I should take a look.

I'd mostly used Macs for like a decade before I gave Mail a try. Just didn't occur to me. Takes a while to break the "first party and/or default is probably not acceptably-decent" mindset. I've found it entirely OK. Good enough it's not at all worth searching for something better (for me—email needs vary greatly, I'm sure)

Kinda like getting used to drag-n-drop usually doing something sensible, rather than its fucking everything up, doing nothing, or causing a crash/state-corruption in the target program. I'd been trained by other platforms to just about never try to use it for anything except dragging files from directory to directory, and had to un-learn that.

I’ve found search in Mail.app to be hopeless, and the solutions you see online of rebuilding Spotlight indexing or deleting-and-recreating your accounts in Mail.app aren’t really solutions in my eyes since they don’t fix the root of the problem (or do so incidentally and invisibly). I use Mail.app only because it integrates with iCloud and my iPhone, otherwise I would go all-in on Thunderbird. On non-Apple machines I always use Thunderbird.