Windows/Mac: Postbox, one of our favourite email clients, picked up a huge update today packed with features. Postbox 4 includes new quick actions that make inserting canned replies or signatures a keystroke away, a new focus view with one-click filters to organise your inbox, a code view and more.
Postbox has been a bit overdue for an update — the last major uplift was several years ago, so today’s news is welcome. Postbox’s new Focus Pane is full of one-click ways to organise your inbox, including buttons to just show messages that are unread, have attachments, haven’t been replied to, are just to you, are social messages (from Facebook, Twitter, or others), subscriptions and more. You can even filter directly by date, and only show messages received today, yesterday, within the past week or from your favourite contacts (all you have to do is drag a name to the favourite contacts section to generate a filter for them.)
Similarly, the new Quick Actions bar is a bit like Spotlight or Launchy, only for Postbox. One key-combination brings up a kind of “launcher” text box that you can type in to quickly insert canned replies into messages, other saved snippets of text, and signatures you’ve created and saved. The latest version also expands on Postbox’s already awesome cloud storage support, and adds Box and OneDrive to its current support for Dropbox and others. For those of us who use Postbox with multiple accounts, it will even warn us now if we’re emailing someone from the wrong address (if I, for example, start to email my Lifehacker colleagues from my personal address, it will warn me) or if I fat-fingered someone’s domain and I’m trying to email them at .net instead of .com, for example.
Those are just the big updates. There’s more too, such as a code view that lets you see the HTML of your and any other email message you have, a smarter compose sidebar that helps you with relevant addresses, images and anything else you might want to insert into your message, and quick unsubscribe links to help you get off mailing lists. Even current features, like tabbed workspaces for accounts, file and image search, and quick replies are all still there, just updated to be a bit faster and smoother. To boot, the interface has picked up a refresh — and while it’s nothing drastically different, even the subtle changes are good ones that help the app feel more modern and recent compared to its older look.
Postbox 4 is available now, and it will set you back $US15. If you’ve purchased Postbox on or after November 20, 2014, you get the upgrade for free. If your licence is older than that, you’ll need to drop the full $US15. We’ve talked about some reasons why you might want a desktop email client before, and what desktop clients do better than webmail in the past, but ultimately you’ll have to decide if its worth the money for how you work. You can pick it up — and learn more about today’s update — at the link below.
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