Airmail is an endlessly customizable improvement over the conventional Mail.app. My identity can be tied back to my inbox. Reach me at one address and you'll get a different version of me than you might on another. We all maintain multiple selves; shifting seamlessly between them is a hallmark of professionalism and grace. Many of today's highest profile email clients try to reshape the way email infiltrates our lives, but Airmail instead returns to this fundamental idea of us being ourselves in different ways and allows this to blossom. Airmail, above anything, is aesthetically customizable. The obvious points on these grounds can be made: you can change the way Airmail looks and feels so easily that the application immediately becomes an extension of yourself after a couple minutes in the preferences. Beyond the superficial dressing up of the app is a slew of tweakable features that let even the tiniest interactions with Airmail feel exactly how you want, from customizable keyboard shortcuts, to unique message behaviors, to robust support for labels, aliases, and folders. And Airmail has seemingly limitless email account support, presenting your multiple inboxes in a comfortable, intuitive way rather than in an impenetrable list. Airmail users are guided towards a conventional approach to email rather than a complete redefinition of the nature of email, and this feels like a deliberate choice rather than a lack of ingenuity. By offering this amount of control over your email, the developers of Airmail put you in a position to make email exactly what you think it should be, rather than having you buy into a new ideology. Yet even this traditional approach is more than it appears: you can turn messages into to-dos that integrate with the Today widget in Notification Center, make them into memos, or just star them for later reference. Google "email thinkpieces" and it may seem like the greatest threat on our productivity, communication or even sanity is email, but Airmail doesn't buy that. It just wants to help you be yourself – whatever that means to you, at the moment.
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