Lots of people find unified folders extremely useful.
They’re completely pointless for me, because different email accounts represent different contexts for me.
But there’s a lot of people who’ve created a gmail account, a hotmail account, have a their ISP account, etc for no particular reason other than the fact that they created an account when these services came by.
A unified folder is extremely useful for such people.
I find them very useful as long as there is a way to make it immediately obvious which account a particular email is connected to (like FairEmail does, for example).
As long as there is a way to disable it, or there is a unified view along with the individual email views. I quite like unified views considering I have three email accounts I need to view, and I don't see the downside of this view as long as when I reply, it automatically replies from the address it was sent to.
> as long as when I reply, it automatically replies from the address it was sent to.
In my experience this is NOT always the case. I handle multiple accounts using unified view, and I've had a _lot_ of "accidents" where I replied from another address than the email address that the email was sent to.
Meaning: an email sent to me at one email address may get a reply (possibly with the email text quoted inside) - from a totally different and unrelated email address. Without me actively selecting a "different" reply account.
For a while it seemed the rule is that you reply using the account you used the last time you interacted with the app (the "last active" account -ish). It really seemed to be the rule, not the exception. I'm not sure if this was/is "by design" or "a bug"
T(hings like t)his is one of the reasons I use email/Thunderbird less these days. The cost per time unit has increased and the risk of uncontrolled events likewise.
Of course account switching is desired in some situations, so this should be possible. With some minor difficulty - at least some sort of minor deliberate action should be needed like click a list to change sender email address away from recipient email address. It should not be default behaviour.
Mail.app offers a unified inbox yes, but it also lets one view inboxes per-account. Just click the disclosure arrow next to the inbox in the sidebar, which displays each account’s inbox of individual viewing.
Mail folders are all shown under sections dedicated to each account in the sidebar.
Actually that's the worst anti-feature for an email client.