Thunderbird. Free and open source, thus no corporate data collection garbage. Even supports extensions like uBlock Origin and comes with PGP encryption built in. They've recently had a major design overhaul as well.

I'd strongly advise against using Spark if you want your emails to remain private.

Not the best advice I can give you. Spark mail client, what looks really beautiful on the outside hides a lot of sorrow underneath, if only you find the time to go through their T&C’s, 2-3y ago when I checked, there was a clause there that was saying they’re allowed to download ALL your emails — which to me is a mental breach to privacy.

I’ve arrived at an age that beautiful UI/UX does not sell it for me anymore unless I get privacy — privacy on should be default IMO; but sadly, we live in a world where this became tabu nowadays… which is quite unfortunate. Personally I just stick with Apple Mail; I receive emails, I can reply back, it’s private enough — enough for me.

I need something like “smart notifications” to only notify for important emails, and not all my incoming emails Group emails (like what Gmail do), for exemple Newsletters, Notifications/ Promotional, …

To make this work with Mail.app, you can use server-side filter rules to sort stuff into respective folders. The big advantage of course being that it doesn't depend on what your client can do (but if you can't use server-side, you can also set up rules directly in Mail.app itself). As for notifications, you can filter them with a "Smart Mailbox" (including checking that it's in a certain folder so you can re-use the rule processing) + setting message notifications to only trigger for that smart mailbox.

I've tried all kinds of apps but in the end I fall back to Mail.app

I use Mail.app for both

Mail.app can do what you need.

• If you assign your important contacts as VIPs, you can set notification settings to only notify fir VIPs

• You can set up a rule to dump your newsletters into folders

Mimestream is the best macOS client if you’re using gmail and are willing to spend money ($50/yr). There is talk of an iOS app, but nothing yet. I use mail.app on the phone.

https://mimestream.com

Lately, email is virtually not a priority outside of work, and is pretty much just storage for service notifications, online receipts, vendor mail, and poor man’s mfa/password resets. I’ve got these classified decently well, and virtually all of these are read/acknowledged in near real time on my phone.

Human to human comms are now over signal or discord, though admittedly I don’t have a great method to track items needing follow up.

All said, how is thunderbird these days?

I like Spark a lot

Spark is pretty good. Has a nice MacOS and iOS app. I like the behaviour of swiping your email as “done” to make it disappear and keep your inbox clean. This is different from moving read email to a folder. You can set the default view of your inbox to only see email that have not been marked as “done”. Search is good too.

Gmail. Never took the time to set the mail app!