Not to mention, if you're old like me, you remember paying (I think?) $100 and then eventually $49 for eudora / upgrades for eudora. In approx 1990 dollars. We now live in a world where people pitch tantrums about paying $10 for an app, and expect perpetual upgrades for that price! So simultaneously expectations have skyrocketed and prices have plummeted.

Part of the problem is, unlike say Pinboard, an email client doesn't feel like 1-3 devs worth of work. The protocols are horrendous, you have to understand the quirks of lots of servers, etc. Plus all the UI and backend and search work. I'm not sure it's approachable as a small indie company.

There's also, of course, bad behavior by large companies such as mozilla: Thunderbird made it very difficult to build an indie email client because you have to compete on merits and against free, but they eventually got bored and just quit making it. Not to mention competing with free/ad-supported. And the semi-annual YC/vc supported email client company.

Not to mention what is coming close to active sabotage of productivity apps by the ios and mac app stores (lack of trials, lack of upgrades, etc).

I remember paying for The Bat! and loving it.

Pegasus mail was pretty good, even if a bit enterprisy. I just searched and wow... it's still being developed! The website even still lists the msdos version. http://www.pmail.com/

That's a long running debate and for our purposes unimportant.

It's still a prominent, maybe even the most prominent, item on my personal list of "reasons I shouldn't build an email app."

point taken.

Yup. I still don't see why everyone complains about current mail clients. Mail.app on OS X / iOS, Outlook on Windows, works for me.

To make me switch, you would have to show me why the new thing was so much better. Like how Google search results were always better than Yahoo! (IMHO, no objective measurements used) so I switched. You would also have to explain it in a sentence I could immediately understand, whereas all the recent clients I've ready about either (a) claim to make things better but don't tell/show me how before I get bored of the page, or (b) use manager speak that I can't understand or is vague and abstract promises to increase collaboration or something. Therefore I've given almost no attention to any recent attempt to change email.

There's a big distance between "works for me" and "delights me."

I use Thunderbird on Linux and Windows. It "works for me," in the sense that it's stable and predictable and doesn't lose my data. But it also has lots of niggly little problems that annoy me, like UI decisions that made more sense ten years ago than they do today and limited tools to support people like me who have a ton of mail.

So while I use and recommend Thunderbird, I also would love to see something come along that is so much better that it makes me fall in love with it, instead of just shrugging my shoulders and resigning myself to this being as good as things get.

How much are you looking to pay for this? How many people are looking for delight in their email client? Do these numbers multiplied add up to a few tens of millions?

"I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client."

Yeah, this is definitely what I saw with Sparrow. For it to become popular it has to be adopted by a substantial number of people. However, I find that only really tech savvy people cared about Sparrow and its streamlined interface. When I showed it to other people, they were reluctant to use anything else because they were afraid to move from their Apple Mail. I'm guessing if Sparrow had existed for windows it would've been the same thing with people using Outlook.

And then there's people who don't even use e-mail, who think it's outdated and prefer PM messaging as a form of communication. It's easy to see why a lot of these promising mail client apps don't really take off the way other apps and services do.

Nevertheless, Sparrow will always have a home in my Mac, as long as it keeps working on OS X.

Same. Sparrow is still my favorite email app on the Mac. Sadly had to give up on it with iOS as it just got super wonky. Will use it as long as it works on OSX.

Still using Sparrow, but wondering if it works on El Capitan? Does anybody use it on El Capitan?

I use it with El Capitan. Still works fine.

Better than fine. Works great. Still the best email client, even after not being updated for years. That's saying something.