The Mail app looked great, but I would hardly call it perfect. It constantly failed to notify me of new emails or calendar events, and I know I'm not alone in that.
Desktop mail clients all seem to be dire, but Mail for Windows 10 seemed to suck a lot less than anything else. I, too, am a victim of it not noticing new mail for a couple of hours after it's sent unless I explicitly refresh it, despite it being set to get new mail on push, but I'd still rather use it over Thunderbird, which I tried years ago, and tried again when they started warning about forcing Outlook onto people. Unfortunately, it looks like Mozilla decided that there were a non-zero number of good things about Outlook, and made a clone of it, as it's got basically all the things I hate about Outlook.
I use thunderbird at home and outlook at work and prefer thunderbird. It works nicely with my catch-all mailserver so it automatically uses the correct outgoing address.
Searching for mails is also a breeze compared to outlook.
The mail server for the accounts I've noticed it struggling with is GMail, and it manages to push mail to other clients on my non-Windows devices just fine.
It was pretty good, but it was hell to troubleshoot.
I've had to set up IMAP on that app a whole bunch of times and if it decides it doesn't like your server, it'll grey out all the settings and show an infinite progress bar that does literally nothing, for up to minutes at a time. Settings that worked yesterday may suddenly be broken. The manual refresh button is more of a suggestion than anything else.
I don't expect Microsoft's new "give us your password and we'll download your email to our cloud, you can trust us" solution to work any better, though. These "apps" make me miss Windows Live Mail and its predecessor, Outlook Express.
As someone who works IT supporting senior citizens, this forced switch is really bad. The mail and calendar app was simple and great for them, and this change sucks. Thunderbird has not been a viable option with those I've tried so far - too different and too complicated for them.
Funny. My grandpa has been using Thunderbird and Libre Office for years, and he never realised it until recently (and he uses it a lot). He recently had an issue for the first time and asked me as he was trying to fix it with Microsoft but didn't get anywhere, and I had to break the news to him it wasn't their product.
I'm not the one who set it up for him btw. But whoever did so made it look as much as to make it easier for him to switch. Which worked as he had no clue and thought he got some free version or so.
I do also use it, but my setup isn't Microsoft-like per se. I'm rather happy with it tho.
Don’t know about perfect, but it was simple and wasn’t bloated like Outlook or Thunderbird. For someone who just needed to send and receive emails, nothing else, it was nice.