by In recent years, we’ve seen an increasing number of Mac apps from China and Russia make a play for American users as well. Foxmail 1.2 (Mac App Store link), the new free email client from Chinese Internet company Tencent, acquits itself better than some foreign imports I’ve seen, with a clean design and a few clever features. But it still doesn’t quite clear the language barrier, and what does make it over that hurdle pales in comparison to other apps closer to home.
Foxmail displayed some HTML messages just fine, but others came through with big chunks missing.
Eerily familiar
On the face of it, Foxmail’s a calm and competent contender for your email attentions. Its IMAP-only setup worked like a charm, and while it doesn’t offer unique ways to sort your mail, it did display all my Gmail tags and folders correctly.
Test enough email apps in a row, and they all begin to blend together. So I can’t say for sure whether the strong, strange sense of déjà vu Foxmail’s look and feel gives me is the result of its designers borrowing heavily from other, similar programs, or just a brain-muddled byproduct of already using so many of its brethren.
Foxmail’s clean, Spartan layout most closely resembles Postbox, but the match isn’t exact. And I could swear I’ve seen another program offer Foxmail’s nifty quick reply feature—just “pull” the message you’re reading downward, and a mini-compose window will appear above it—but I can’t recall where.
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