Email and Hook

Computer

I’d been looking at my email clients on the Mac for using with Hook. I like the ability to link any previous email, as it helps me link to emails I’ve received or sent within my Obsidian notebook, and to be honest, it’s paid off a number of times now where it was quicker to look for the specific email that I’d linked in my Obsidian notebook, rather than search for the email I needed.

However, Hook only supports a small number of email clients, and the main one I use is Outlook - this isn’t supported well, due to Microsoft’s programming, as the linking back to the emails isn’t great and can be broken by moving the email.

Using the linkable apps page on Hook’s website, I’m left with:

I’ve investigated each of them in turn.

AirMail

I’ve used in the past and run in to issues - I wouldn’t try it again. Consistent crashes and failures mean that I’m not going near it.

Apple Mail

I can’t for the life of me get a HTML signature within the program and therefore cannot comply with the company rules, so sending emails from Mail is out of the question. I feel it has questionable abilities to deal with attachments in my view - I don’t want in line PDF reading.

Fastmail

Not an option, as I’d have to direct my Office 365 work emails to it, as Fastmail is an email service, not a client.

Mailmate

I thought I’d give this one a try - it’s a power user email client and I needed to consult the internet and download a beta copy to get it to be used with Office 365 OAuth, as we use multi factor authentication. Whilst it initially worked without issue, when I sent emails, I ended up with two saves copies on the server, which isn’t great. I assume that it was saving a copy and Exchange was saving a copy. When I came back to it, it had downloaded a lot of error messages about not being able to download via IMAP, so with those two issues, it looked like it was out.

Postbox

Postbox is in the annoying category - on my laptop it works without issue, but try connecting on the Mac Mini and I’m running in to issues where it won’t connect to the OAuth server. This means that this is not usable, which is a shame.

Multiple Clients

So it can be seen that the only way I can email well on the Mac is with multiple clients - one to do all the sending (Outlook) and then another to record the Hook links with - not really ideal, as I would have preferred a single client.

However, I’ll cope with two if I really have to!