Over the last few years, email has become an integral part of our daily lives. It has evolved from a simple way to send and receive text between two parties into a familiar and reliable method of communication that can be used as a place to receive newsletters, updates, and notifications from various services, etc. Several email apps have built additional features and experiences on top of the core email technology, such as shared inboxes, team collaboration, delegation, inline comments, etc.
We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Made for Gmail is a beautifully designed and highly powerful Gmail app for your Mac. It is a 3rd party client that lives in your menubar and with just one click (or hotkey press) allows you to instantly access your Gmail account. It makes reading and writing emails blistering fast. App for Gmail gives you a complete control of your mail. Notifications when you receive a new email. App for Gmail for Mac. App for Gmail for Mac. $1.99 Zhulq Mac OS X 10.10/10.8/10.9 Version.
Finding an email client for your Mac is not a trivial task. There are numerous free email apps for Mac that are released every few months and many simply shut down or disappear just as easily. Thankfully, we’ve made it easy for you by picking some of the best email apps out there and highlighting everything you should know about them. By the end of this article, you’ll emerge fully aware why Readdle’s Spark is by far the best email app for Mac.
Here’s our roundup of all the good email clients available for macOS:
1. Apple Mail app
Pricing: Free
Pros: Good set of basic features, well-integrated with the OS, great for starters.
Cons: Lacks advanced features, no customization options, often ignored by Apple.
Cons: Lacks advanced features, no customization options, often ignored by Apple.
It’s nearly impossible to talk about the best email apps for Mac and not include Apple’s own Mail.app in the list. Apple Mail is a reliable & solid email app for Mac that is a great option for someone just starting off with email. It comes bundled with macOS and integrates well with the major email service providers. Mail app works best when used with iCloud and automatically sets up the iCloud email account when you set up your iCloud account on your Mac.
It has a basic set of features that are good enough for novice users to get started with the essential email experience. If you’ve just switched to a Mac from a PC, you’ll find the Apple Mail app experience far better than anything you’ve previously used from Microsoft. But you’ll quickly realize that Apple Mail lacks the essential email features that are must-have in today’s day and age and you’ll find yourself searching for the best Apple Mail alternative on Mac.
2. Microsoft Outlook for Mac
Pricing: Free to download, but requires a Microsoft 365 Subscription starting $70/year
Pros: Comes bundled with other Microsoft apps, Built-in Calendar, Dark Mode
Cons: Expensive in the long run, cluttered User Interface, unfamiliar design language on Mac
Cons: Expensive in the long run, cluttered User Interface, unfamiliar design language on Mac
Microsoft Outlook for Mac is what Apple Mail would be if you threw in a bunch of features and made it look like every other Microsoft app. Unlike the Outlook Mail app on iOS which is praised by many, Outlook for Mac feels like a cluttered mess designed by a team of programmers 10 years ago. It is, however, packed with several great email features. Outlook has what it calls a Focused Inbox, which automatically sorts your important or personal emails into the Focused tab and separates the rest of the junk like newsletters and marketing emails into a separate tab.
Outlook comes bundled with a Microsoft 365 subscription that gives you access to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, and OneDrive, so if you use any of these apps on your Mac, you can easily start using Outlook for Mac over Apple Mail and take advantage of all its good features. It works with email services like Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud and pretty much anything that supports POP3 or IMAP protocols (I’m looking at you HEY Email). However, if you want a Mac email client that has both a beautiful design & a feature-rich approach, you have to look no further than Spark.
3. Spark
Pricing: Free for Individuals & Small Teams, with optional Premium plans for teams that require more features
Pros: Beautiful & polished design, elegant aesthetics, feature-packed, multi-platform, several team-focused features, great for collaboration.
Cons: Lacks a Windows app (currently in development)
Cons: Lacks a Windows app (currently in development)
Spark is a beautifully designed and feature-rich email client from the house of Readdle, known for their suite of productivity apps for iOS and Mac. Spark offers a distraction-free email experience through a delightful interface and a very powerful set of features. It works with all major email services like Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, Hotmail, Aol, GMX, Exchange, as well as any IMAP account.
Spark features a Smart Inbox that automatically sorts incoming email in collections of Personal email, Notifications, and Newsletters. This lets you focus on all the important emails first, while the rest of the clutter takes a back seat. This, coupled with the Smart Notifications feature that only alerts you about the important emails is a great way to take control of your inbox and get productive.
Spark comes with a smart & robust email search feature using which you can locate any email buried deep down in an instant. Simply search for what you’re looking for using Natural Language Search terms and Spark will find it for you. Type “Attachments from Nick” to search for all emails from Nick that have attachments in them, and “PDF attachments from David sent last week on Monday” to bring up all those emails from last Monday from David that have PDF files in them. You can even save your frequent searches, so locating those emails is just a click away.
If you don’t feel like attending to an email right away (such as bill reminders or upcoming renewal notifications), you can set the email aside temporarily using the Snooze feature and reduce the clutter in your inbox. You can schedule emails to be sent later, get reminded to follow-up if you don’t get a response by a stipulated deadline, integrate with a bunch of different apps & services, and so much more. Spark has all the features you need to work with email.
One area where Spark really shines is Spark for Teams. Invite your team members to Spark to collectively work on email together. Spark for Teams lets you Delegate emails — complete with a due date, Share & Discuss email with teammates with inline comments, collaborate on email with a real-time editor on Shared Drafts and share your emails with teammates without manually forwarding them and cluttering up their inboxes.
Overall, Spark is a remarkable bundle of all the features you need to work with email. It’s a fantastic email app for Individuals, and even better for teams. You don’t have to deal with two different versions — the same Spark app is the best Mac email client for personal use and adapts itself with built-in features to become the best email app for teams as well.
Best of all, Spark is absolutely free, so you really have no reason to miss out on the wonderful experience that Spark has in store for you.
4. Airmail
Pricing: Free, but requires a Recurring Subscription of $2.99/mo for Pro features
Pros: Loaded with features, fast, and has a Unified Inbox.
Cons: Messy UI that feels like it was hastily put together, requires Pro subscription for most features.
Cons: Messy UI that feels like it was hastily put together, requires Pro subscription for most features.
What messenger for mac os. Airmail is a popular email client available for macOS that boasts of several features in its satchel. It supports all the popular email service providers including Exchange, as well as accounts with IMAP or POP3 access. Just like in Spark, there’s an Unified Inbox feature that lets you view emails from all your accounts in one place.
If you have a Mac notebook with a Touch Bar, Airmail puts your frequently used actions on it so that they’re just a tap away. You can, of course, customize these actions with your favorite set. There’s a lovely Dark Mode to help you with the night sessions, Quick Replies for short responses, a Today Widget to get a quick overview of your inbox, and a handy Share Extension so you can instantly email anything using Airmail.
Overall, Airmail is a really good email app for macOS, and would do really well if it wasn’t for its messy UI and it’s requirement of a recurring subscription of $2.99/mo for Pro features that hasn’t gone down well with its users.
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5. Mailplane
Pricing: $30
Pros: Brings the familiar Gmail experience with a native interface
Cons: Only works with Gmail, often breaks due to changes by Google
Cons: Only works with Gmail, often breaks due to changes by Google
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If you have multiple Gmail accounts that you use simultaneously, Mailplane is the app you need to have on your Mac. Simply put, Mailplane is a native Mac app that wraps around the familiar web interface of Google’s products. With Mailplane, you get Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts — all in the same application. You can use multiple accounts in the app, and you can mix and match the accounts & services. For example, you can have Tab 1 for your personal Gmail account, Tab 2 for your G Suite for Work account, and Tab 3 for your Work Calendar account.
Mailplane has a handy notifier that not only alerts you about new emails, but also shows unread messages count in the menu bar. It has a ‘Search Everywhere’ feature that lets you simultaneously search for emails across different mailboxes. It also seamlessly integrates with a bunch of different macOS apps. My favorite Mailplane feature is that since it is essentially a browser for Google’s web UIs, it supports most of the popular third-party extensions to enhance your experience. You can enable Grammarly to improve your language, Simplify/Gmail to clean up the Gmail UI, Boomerang for Gmail to power-up features, Clearbit to add context to email addresses, and so on.
Unfortunately, your experience is still plagued with issues as Mailplane has to depend on Gmail’s web UI for it to work correctly and oftentimes it just fails to load Gmail, asking you to load an basic HTML version instead. You’ll also often be annoyed by Gmail asking you to enter your account credentials to verify yourself if you use too many accounts in Mailplane. To avoid these hassles, you can set up multiple Gmail accounts in Spark for Mac. This way, you get a premium native email experience and you also have access to your Google Calendar and contacts at your disposal.
6. Canary Mail
Pricing: $20
Pros: Good design, with heavy focus on Security & Privacy
Cons: Lacks Team features
Cons: Lacks Team features
Canary Mail is another email app for macOS that puts a heavy focus on privacy and security. It features end-to-end encryption, full PGP support, and an open source mail sync engine, making it a good choice for users who rely on PGP for all their email communication.
Canary has a beautiful design that looks like any other native Mac app built by Apple. There are familiar icons and buttons in the Mac app, and the UI is built to be simple yet powerful. It’s almost like the default Mail app on steroids.
While Canary is a pretty good email app for personal use, it lacks team collaboration features that are the need of the hour today. If you need to discuss emails with your team, need to draft emails together, and want to share emails without manually forwarding them, then Spark Mail app is what you really need.
7. Newton Mail
Pricing: Recurring Subscription of $49.99/yr
Pros: Multi-platform, Minimal & elegant design
Cons: Expensive subscription with an unclear future
Cons: Expensive subscription with an unclear future
Newton mail is an immensely popular email app that has spent quite some time in the news cycle lately. The app has an extensive set of features that make it an attractive choice for normal and pro users both. Newton features a very minimalistic user interface that takes the clutter out and lets you focus on the core email experience. Unfortunately, the UI is a little too minimal for many who are bothered by the empty spaces in the app.
In recent times, Newton has managed to alienate its loyal users after it announced that it is shutting down, two times in a row. The first time, the original owners of Cloudmagic announced that they were shutting down Newton, only to be bought over by Andy Rubin’s phone company Essential. Then for round #2, when Essential was shutting down, they announced that Newton would meet its end as well, only to be brought back by two independent fans of the service who didn’t want to see it die. As of now, there’s no clear future for Newton, especially considering that the service is priced at a hefty $50 per year.
When pitted against all the popular email apps for Mac available in the market, Spark Mail app emerges as the best email app for Mac by a long margin. It has the absolute perfect combination of a friendly & elegant user interface along with an extensive & robust set of features. Coupled with its impeccable polish, seamless integrations, phenomenal team features, and highly impressive price of being available for free, there’s really nothing that comes close to being a viable contender. Spark is truly the best email client for Mac.
It’s a no-brainer to use Gmail in a Web browser window on a desktop computer, such as your Mac. That’s how Google intends it to be used.
But many Gmail users prefer to use a desktop email app, such as Apple’s stock Mail app. This is a reasonable approach, but an imperfect one, due to an architectural disconnect between Gmail’s labels and the limitations of the IMAP standard used by email clients. Joe Kissell devotes an entire chapter of Take Control of Apple Mail to getting Gmail and Apple Mail working together, yet incompatibilities persist.
A new desktop email app aims to sweep away such issues. Mimestream, created by former Apple engineer Neil Jhaveri, is a Swift app designed from the ground up for Gmail. Just log in and go, with no futzing to get email working properly, and with familiar Gmail features functioning as expected. Jhaveri worked on Apple Mail (among other projects) during his tenure at Apple from 2010 to 2017.
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Mimestream is very much a work in progress, and Jhaveri has a long list of Gmail capabilities that aren’t yet supported. But the app is far enough along to pique our interest, and we wanted to tell you about it. Needless to say, you shouldn’t consider this article a formal review of the app.
Though Mimestream will eventually be a paid app, it’s free to use while it’s in beta.
Mimestream works only in macOS 10.15 Catalina or later because, according to Jhaveri, it leverages APIs and capabilities (like SwiftUI) available only in the latest versions of macOS. “Mimestream intends to showcase the best that the Mac has to offer, and new versions will generally require the latest version of macOS,” Jhaveri says.
How Mimestream Is Similar
Superficially, Mimestream doesn’t look all that different from other native Mac email programs.
You could almost mistake it for Apple Mail, given its three vertical panes, with a left-hand sidebar for navigating among your Gmail accounts and their various message repositories and identifiers, a middle column that shows message lists, and a right-hand pane where individual messages appear.
As a native Mac app, Mimestream has features you’d expect, such as message caching, offline support, macOS notifications, keyboard shortcuts, and toolbar customizations.
Jhaveri said Mimestream users can expect decent performance for several reasons, including the fact that the app is multithreaded to perform background sync in parallel with users’ actions as it taps multiple cores on a Mac.
How Mimestream Is Different
How Mimestream differs from Apple Mail starts with IMAP—short for Internet Message Access Protocol—which is how desktop email programs commonly sync messages with a mail server. That’s how Apple Mail accesses Gmail. It does so dependably, but imperfectly and eccentrically.
As Joe Kissell notes in his book:
Gmail’s implementation of IMAP is highly nonstandard. No matter how you slice it, the experience of using Gmail in Mail won’t be exactly like using a conventional IMAP server, nor will it reflect what you might expect if you’re used to using Gmail in a Web browser. It’s a weird and potentially frustrating hybrid of the two, and while some people don’t mind it at all, others find it so annoying that they stop using either Mail or Gmail.
To be fair, Google bolted IMAP support onto Gmail as a courtesy for those who wanted to use desktop email clients; at its heart, Gmail simply doesn’t think of mail in the same way as IMAP.
Mimestream mostly bypasses IMAP, harnessing Google’s Gmail API instead to replicate Gmail’s web features on the Mac desktop more faithfully. As a result, a number of Gmail capabilities have already migrated gracefully to Mimestream:
- Labels: One of Gmail’s marquee features, labels are tags you apply to messages so you can more easily find them later. One message can have multiple labels. Apple Mail has trouble with this because it wants to treat labels as mailboxes, which aren’t the same thing (a message can exist in only one mailbox at a time). Mimestream supports labels natively.
- Aliases: By this, I mean Gmail’s option to authorize addresses from other accounts as valid From addresses when sending mail. Getting this to work in Apple Mail requires a bit of tinkering—Joe Kissell’s book tells you how—but it is automatic and seamless in Mimestream.
- Search: Standard Gmail search queries are supported, with the added benefit of offline searching through cached messages.
- Signatures: To my surprise, the signatures I’d painstakingly assembled in my various Gmail accounts appeared in Mimestream exactly as they do in the Gmail Web app (but you can’t edit them in Mimestream). In Apple Mail, Gmail signatures don’t show up and have to be replicated.
- Inbox categories: This more recent Gmail feature optionally partitions the inbox into four classifications called Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums. You have the flexibility to do this in Mimestream, even if you don’t have it set up this way in the Gmail Web app.
Because Mimestream largely bypasses IMAP, it solves an issue that bedevils some who use Gmail at work or school with organizational accounts. Network administrators can turn off IMAP, which restricts mail users to the Gmail Web app even if they might prefer to use a desktop app. That’s the case where I work, yet Mimestream downloads my email just fine.
But there’s a wrinkle. Because Mimestream does harness IMAP for push email, that feature is absent in the app in accounts that have IMAP disabled on the back end. As a result, I have to fetch my work messages manually at intervals.
This end-run around IMAP blocking for message downloading may not be available forever. As Jhaveri explains:
The fact that the Gmail API remains open, even with IMAP off, is probably an oversight on Google’s end, and I would not be surprised if it is plugged at some point in the future. It was certainly never an advantage that I planned for or even anticipated.
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With that in mind, Jhaveri said he is looking for ways to make push work directly with the Gmail API and not require an IMAP connection.
Mac Desktop App For Gmail
Where Mimestream Is Going
As noted, Mimestream is not yet a full substitute for the Gmail Web app because it still lacks many important features. Some of these are on Jhaveri’s roadmap for upcoming versions, but others are not supported by the Gmail API and are therefore unlikely to make an appearance anytime soon. I am not listing every absent feature here, but you can find a full accounting on the Mimestream FAQs page.
Features on track for inclusion in upcoming versions of Mimestream include:
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- Filtering by Unread: This is a must-have feature for some. TidBITS publisher Adam Engst said he couldn’t use Mimestream in its current form because “it has no way of showing just unread messages in a label, which is key for me.”
- Priority Inbox: Though Inbox Categories are supported, Mimestream cannot yet handle the similar Priority Inbox feature that automatically sorts messages into three sections: important and unread, starred, and everything else.
- Move To menu command: Right now, you have to drag messages onto labels, which isn’t always the easiest approach.
- Undo Send: You know how you always think of something to add to a message as soon as you click Send? Undo Send gives you a short window to abort delivery of a just-queued message.
- Editing of server-side filters: As it stands, you can manage filters only within the Gmail Web app, and it would be nice to create and modify filters without logging in to Gmail.
- An unsubscribe shortcut: Promotional email often includes unsubscribe headers that email apps can use to create an interface that makes unsubscribing easy.
- Editing of vacation auto-responses: Again, this task currently requires you to log in to Gmail, but that shouldn’t be necessary.
Best Mac Apps For Gmail
Gmail features unsupported by the Gmail API and therefore unlikely to show up in Mimestream in the foreseeable future include:
- Message snoozing: It’s easy in Gmail’s Web app to hide a message with a snoozing command that brings it back on a chosen day and time. Mimestream-only snoozing is under consideration.
- Scheduled sending: Sometimes you want to schedule a queued message to be sent at a specific future time.
- Conversation muting: Occasionally, a conversation will blow up and overwhelm you with notifications.
It’s important to note other areas where Mimestream and Gmail’s Web app are rapidly and drastically diverging. For instance, Google recently integrated other services such as Meet video conferencing and Chat messaging into its Gmail Web app. It had earlier done the same with Calendar, Tasks, and its Keep notes. Such integrations are not on Mimestream’s short-term roadmap.
Is Mimestream For You?
You can probably easily answer this for yourself since, among Gmail fans, Mimestream is liable to elicit one of two visceral reactions, either “Holy cow, I can’t wait for this puppy to be finished” or “Meh.”
Despite being intrigued by Mimestream, I must confess to fitting into the latter camp—I find that the Gmail Web app has become attractive, flexible, and powerful over its 14-year lifespan.
But if you prefer the desktop app approach, alternatives to Mimestream do exist. Some of these can barely be called apps; they’re just wrappers that embed Gmail’s Web interface into a standalone Mac window but otherwise add little to the experience.
Other apps are more ambitious and combine Gmail’s Web interface with Mac features for a hybrid experience. One example is Mailplane, which both Adam and I have used for a long time (see “Mailplane Goes Chrome and Adds Features,” 17 August 2018).
There’s also Kiwi, another hybrid Gmail app that is good for those who make heavy use of other Google Web apps, such as Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. Each of these appears in standalone windows for enhanced productivity, so Kiwi is a fine choice for those who are all in with Google services and want to multitask comfortably in a Web environment.
Since Mailplane and Kiwi use Gmail’s Web interface as their starting point, the aforementioned Google integrations—including Chat, Meet, Tasks, and Keep—also work fine.
Call of duty 3 for mac free download. But Mimestream might carve out a niche for itself as a Gmail-friendly desktop app that is fully operational offline—perfect for business travelers and others who might deal with iffy Internet connections that hamper the use of Gmail’s Web app.
Messages for mac not syncing itunes. Everything was slowing down, so I made the big jump to a new 13″ MacBook Pro Retina with TouchBar.
It’s early days with Mimestream, and much too soon to render a definitive judgment, but we’ll eagerly monitor its progress.