There are several instances when you need a desktop-friendly email client app. One, you may have a self-hosted email account but couldn’t afford to get the Google Business Suite. Or, you may be fed up with the traditional interface offered by Gmail and Outlook.
An email client that handles messages from multiple addresses in one central place is much more efficient, but you'll need to configure your new email client to properly check each of your accounts. Email providers often use different methods to configure their services, and it can be time-consuming and frustrating to configure each one manually.
Or, probably you would want to manage your emails; get real-time notifications, and enjoy other details on your computer. Previously, we have covered the best email clients for Android.
This time, however, is for Mac. Fortunately, there is a big number of Mac email clients out there. Every day, we see the rise of something innovative. In this article, we have compiled some of the best and versatile email clients for Mac.
Regardless of who you are and the work you do, you’ll find a suitable app here. Shall we begin? Read: Best Email Client for Mac #1 Mail (Apple Mail App) Unlike Windows, macOS ships with an inbuilt email client — named Mail. It’s probably one of the best email clients you can have for Mac too. The best part about Mail is that it keeps you active on the Apple ecosystem. That is, you can use the same app on your iPhone or iPad, syncing every bit of information you have.
There are also features like Handoff for those who are in Apple ecosystem. Handoff basically lets you start working on an email on your iPhone and complete it later on the Mac.
It’s one of the exclusive features you’ll find in Mail. Keep that aside, and Mail app is the typical email client you can find. Mail does not offer much scope for customization or experimentation. There are a few add-on stuff, but they are not great. Free to use and built into macOS. Continuity features like Handoff Cons. A non-intuitive, rudimentary design.
Lacks customization. Navigation could be better If you are looking for a simple email client for Mac, Mail is the best option. If you are in the Apple ecosystem, you can benefit from features like Handoff.
Otherwise, you have different options too. It must also be noted that you don’t have to pay anything to use Mail. (free) #2 Canary Mail — Secure Email Client for Mac Canary Mail is one of the most feature-friendly email clients for Mac. Even when offering a modern UI, it has not made any compromises in terms of security.
It’s also one of the very few email clients that offer PGP Encryption. As oxymoronic as it sounds, Canary Mail is a fun & secure email client for Mac.
It works with your own email accounts as well as services like Gmail. There are a few features that we loved in Canary Mail. For instance, it offers two types of inboxes — normal and Focused. Thanks to Natural Language Search and Filters, you can quickly find emails that you are looking for.
Email Templates, Snooze Features and Read-Receipt Notifications etc. Are also included in the email app by default. Canary Mail also offers one of the best User Interface designs we’ve seen. You can enjoy the Dark theme on both your Mac and iOS devices. If you ask us, though, we’d say the best thing about Canary Mail is the on-demand nature. You can keep all the super features aside and Canary Mail will still be an awesome way to manage your emails. Pros.
A modern, intuitive UI. On-demand Encryption, Read Receipt, and Focused Inbox features. Seamless integration. Multi-device support Cons.
AI Cleaner isn’t up to the mark Canary Mail is undoubtedly one of the most feature-rich email clients for Mac. It offers a state-of-the-art set of security and functionality. The AI features aren’t perfect, but you can get started. We also loved the multi-touch gesture support too. ($20) #3 Boxy — Best macOS Email Client for Gmail Boxy is the best Mac email client for those who use Inbox by Gmail. Inbox by Gmail, in case you did not know, is a rather focused webmail interface.
It also integrates with other Google services like Calendar and To-Dos. Now, Boxy is bringing all those features to a desktop app. You can simply log in using the Gmail account and get all the benefits. The interface is no different from Inbox by Gmail.
That having said, Boxy is easier to manage than the web-based UI. You also get one of the best Email Compose interfaces we’ve seen. In short, Boxy brings all good things about Gmail Inbox to your desktop. There is support for notifications as well as on-time sync as well.
Boxy also supports a bunch of common keyboard shortcuts. If you ask us, we’d recommend Boxy for the sake of the cleaner UI. Everything is available in a clean-packed way. Talking about the UI, Boxy lets you choose between different viewing modes as well as themes. You can, for instance, choose between Dark, Black, White and Crimson themes. Of course, it’s a downside that you cannot use other accounts here.
Pros. Cleaner UI. Optimized for Inbox by Gmail.
Easy Mail Management Cons. Doesn’t work with non-Gmail accounts.
Lacks customization Boxy is loved for the simple way it presents your Gmail messages. If you are a Gmail + Google user, Boxy is a superb way to keep track of your email world. We’d recommend Boxy if you want a desktop experience for Gmail messages. (Free) #4 Spark — Smartest Email Client for Mac Spark is one of the most versatile email clients we’ve seen for Mac. Developers of Spark say it is the future of email, and we may agree with that. The best thing about Spark is that you can use it for personal as well as organization-level needs. This email client has been designed in a clean manner that you can completely focus on creating the best email.
Unlike many of the email apps we’ve covered, Spark comes with a Smart Inbox. This Inbox can identify the type of email and put it to categories like Personal and Social. You can also Pin certain emails for the further look on the go. Plus, Spark lets you manage them quite easily.
Or, if you want, you can shift to the Classic Inbox as well. There are also some awesome features like, follow-up reminders, integrated calendar, smart search, Quick replies, and worthwhile integrations.
You can also optimize Smart Notifications so that you are alerted in case of important emails. By the way, Spark has a variant named Spark for Teams, which offers a bunch of features for in-team collaboration. Pros.
Clean Design. Smart Inbox with Categories. Rich Email Creation Experience Cons.
None worth noting Spark should be your go-to choice if you need a simple email client with smart features. The developers have succeeded in including the features without making the app so bulky. In case you have a big team, you can go for Spark for Teams as well. (Free) #5 Thunderbird — Best Free Email Client for Mac Thunderbird is a completely free, open-source email client, available for various platforms. Being a project from Mozilla, you can count on Thunderbird when you want a secure email management experience. You’ll have to miss out some fancy features that we’ve seen in earlier products. Still, you are getting a non-clumsy way to manage email.
Talking about the UI, Thunderbird does not have anything modern to offer. For instance, it does not have a unified interface for showing emails. You can double-click on a message, which would be opened in another tab. On the right side, you can access the Integrated Calendar as well. On the bright side, however, this email client offers one of the best performance levels we’ve seen. We really believe that Thunderbird can be better with some basic work from the team. For instance, one of the less intuitive things is to configure a new account with Thunderbird.
At the same time, we really liked a few features like the Integrated Address Book and better Preferences when it comes to displaying emails. It is a simple tool, but nothing much.
Pros. Simple, Clean Design. Better Security and Open Source Cons. Rudimentary Design. Lacks many features Thunderbird isn’t for everyone.
If you are looking for a completely free and open-source email client for Mac, it’s probably the only choice. By doing so, however, you are missing out some of the cool features. On the brighter side, you don’t have to pay a single penny. (Free) #6 Postbox — Best macOS Email Client for Multiple Accounts Postbox is yet another email client that deserves a place here. It’s probably the best email client for Mac that comes with a lot of features. If you are someone who manages multiple email accounts and wants a cleaner UI, Postbox makes sense. This app is simple, clear and powerful, to quote the developers themselves.
And, after testing it for a while, we thought the same. Account Management is perhaps the best thing in Postbox. You can manage your multiple accounts as well as corresponding folders from the sidebar. The modern UI lets you view an email message and perform a lot of actions without much navigation.
Postbox also offers a Universal Search feature, which is helpful when it comes to finding emails and attachments. We also loved the Focus Pane in Postbox. If you’re involved in multiple projects, this feature would help you in easy navigation. Pre-canned responses and HTML editing are some nerd-focused features we found in the email app. In short, Postbox does not compromise the number of features, but you still have an intuitive way to do things.
Pros. Simple UI and Integration. Integrated Account Management Cons. Navigation Could Be Better Postbox is a wonderful email app for Mac that everyone can use. It packs a number of features we have not seen in other packages. Still, we’d recommend Postbox for professionals, who have to manage multiple mail accounts as well as folders.
(Paid, $40) #7 Airmail — Best Overall Email Client for Mac We’ve saved the best for the last: Airmail. Airmail is by far the most popular email client for macOS. It is so good that people have been using it for personal, professional and combined needs. Just so you know, it is available for both macOS and iOS.
You can enjoy the features as well as the same interface on both devices, thanks to the sync. Navigation is one of the strong points of Airmail.
Through a widely customizable design, you can view your emails, folders and other aspects easily. This email client has packed many features without compromising the intuitive nature of the User Interface. Even for someone who hasn’t used an email client before, Airmail is the best place to start. Better organization of your emails is possible through Airmail, which is a great perk for most people. You can for instance snooze the email messages, star them and manage the whole conversation easily. Because this app is available for both iOS and macOS, you can have benefits of sync as well. Also, you can integrate a lot of services like Dropbox, Calendar and Google Drive with Airmail.
Pros. Intuitive Interface. Ample scope for Customization and Integration.
Easy Management Cons. Lacks smart categorization of emails At the end of the day, Airmail is the best-balanced email client for macOS. You don’t have to worry about an extremely tough set-up or hard-to-understand features. For the price you pay, Airmail offers one of the best email and account management experiences.
($9.99) Which is the best Email client for Mac? You have seen some of the best email clients you can have right now for macOS. Some of these apps, Spark and Airmail, have multi-device support as well.
You can enjoy the same interface and features on your Mac as well as iPhone. Another thing we loved about Spark is that it categorizes emails based on the type, making it really easy for Quick Look. However, if you need better continuity support, we’d recommend sticking onto the Apple Mail app. And, for anyone who is looking for the best spot between both, Airmail and Postbox would be our recommendations.
In other words, depending on the level of features you need, you can choose one of these seven email clients for macOS. Awesome, huh?
A recent surge of worthy new email clients offers Mac users some of the best choices they’ve ever had for managing their mail. With a panoply of clever features and new ideas, these contenders have also mounted a serious challenge to the relatively stagnant Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook. But with so may options to choose from, it’s now even harder to pick out the best email client for your particular needs. We’ve found one strong program that offers a great mix of features, usability, and value for a broad swath of users, plus several more that will cater well to more specialized preferences.
Top choice: Postbox 3 ( ) isn’t the newest or sleekest candidate in this roundup. Its design hews more closely to the traditional Mac look and feel, rather than adopting a slick iOS-like appearance. But for $10, it combines reliable performance, smart design, and a wide array of impressive features that make the program feel like what Apple Mail ought to be.
Even though it’s built on Mozilla’s aging Thunderbird underpinnings, Postbox handled my email quickly and confidently. Setting up new POP and IMAP accounts went smoothly; in one case, when I tried to set up a work Outlook account, Postbox patiently guessed at several different IMAP configurations until it found the right one. It then filled up my new mailbox relatively quickly, despite the pile of messages involved, and let me track its progress with a clear but unobtrusive progress icon. Everywhere you turn in Postbox, you’ll find well-thought-out features that enhance your email experience. Message threads are easy to follow, with each message’s beginning and end clearly marked, and a quick reply box waiting at the end of the most recent message. An inspector pane next to each message shows you not only who sent it —and, with a click, their entire contact card from your address book—but breaks out any links, images, maps, or package delivery info it finds in the message. You can also easily search for any messages, images, or attachments from a particular sender just by clicking links within their address book info.
And if work requires you to send a lot of form responses, Postbox builds in that ability. Just compose your response in preferences, then choose it from a pulldown menu when you’re writing a new email. Postbox 3 Postbox plays nicely with many popular social and productivity tools.
If you have Evernote installed, Postbox can send emails to that service to help you keep track of them. Once you set up your account information, dragging and dropping files from your Dropbox will create links that let recipients download those files straight from your Dropbox account. And you can tie in your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to not only get links to your contacts on those services, but post to all three directly from Postbox.
The program will even use the service to pull in images for your friends and acquaintances from one or more of those services. A helpful To-Do mode lets you create new tasks, or turn existing messages into tasks, then check them off as you finish. Postbox also integrates an RSS reader to keep track of your favorite feeds, an increasingly rare feature among modern email clients. And Postbox provides great support for Gmail, including the ability to use Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts. None of these features gets in the way of simply sending or receiving email, but they’re all readily available when you need them. Finding and using all these features can get a bit intimidating when you first start using it, but Postbox’s clear, straightforward, and easily searchable online help files make the learning curve much gentler. Postbox 3 has begun to show its age; OS X updates since its initial release have actually broken a few features, such as integration with the Mac’s Calendar.
But overall, Postbox seems like the best mix of price, capabilities, and quality for the majority of Mac users. Top contenders Inky Inky If you use email more for pleasure than business, you’ll likely enjoy Inky’s earnest efforts to present your inbox in ways that matter to you. Built for portability, ( ) stores information for your POP and IMAP accounts—but not your mail itself—securely on its remote servers. Once you’ve set up that info, a single Inky login will bring all your email to any computer you’re using Inky with. In a clean, colorful interface, Inky lets you view mail as a unified inbox, by individual accounts, or by several different clever Smart Views.
The program’s smart enough to automatically recognize and sort messages containing maps, package info, daily deals, subscription mailings, and other common categories. By clicking icons on each message, you can also teach Inky how to rank your email by relevance, so that it’ll display messages that matter to you more prominently.
I occasionally had trouble logging in to Inky, and had to quit and restart the program a few times to get to my mail. And Inky doesn’t offer business-friendly features like to-do lists, or any bells and whistles beyond sorting and handling email.
But it’s free, it’s fun to use, and it’s full of well-executed and practical new ideas. Mail Pilot Mail Pilot The same can be said for (; ), a $20 email client built loosely around the approach to productivity. It looks terrific, but for all its good qualities, it’s still missing a few crucial features.
Mail Pilot treats your inbox as a to-do list. Each message is a task that you can check off right away, set aside until you’ve got the time for it, or ask to be reminded about on a certain date. Clearly labeled keyboard shortcuts at the bottom of the screen make these tasks easy to accomplish. It’s IMAP-only, and setting up your account ranges from simple (Gmail) to tricky (Outlook, although the program’s great help files spelled out exactly what I needed.) Once your mail’s in place, Mail Pilot offers lots of different options to navigate message threads.
The variety puzzled me at first, but I came to appreciate the different ways it sorted and stacked my messages. As a fairly new program, Mail Pilot’s still somewhat under construction. The ability to save new messages as drafts or search by message text won’t arrive until a later version.
But if you’re in synch with Mail Pilot’s productivity-first approach, you’ll nonetheless find the program helpful and worthwhile. Unibox Unibox Give it a few more versions, and (; ) could become quite the contender. Right now, it’s a very well-designed and usable $10 app with a few pesky hiccups.
Setting up IMAP accounts is fast and easy, and once your mailboxes are populated, Unibox displays them not by message title, but by who sent you mail on a given day. From the top of the screen, you can switch between viewing each sender’s message thread, or seeing all the attachments or images in that thread by list or by icon.
I really enjoyed Unibox’s sleek and efficient one-window interface, which makes maximum use of space while still displaying your mail clearly. The new message window slides down from the top of each message thread. Buttons to sort, junk, or delete a message materialize when your mouse hovers to the left of it; replying and forwarding options appear when you hover to the right. I wasn’t as fond of the blank screen Unibox displayed upon loading until I manually refreshed my mail. And it has a bad habit of truncating longer messages by default, forcing you to click again to read the whole thing. Still, it’s a smart program full of good ideas; it just needs a bit more polish.
The rest of the pack AirMail ( ) offers an attractive, inexpensive front end for your IMAP-based webmail of choice. But while the program’s interface is nice to look at, it’s not always easy to use, with tiny, hard-to-see buttons and space-hogging new message windows.
Gmail messages also take an unusually long time to load; promised Dropbox support proved impossible to set up; and AirMail offers few help features. Mail.app I used to love Apple Mail ( ) but it’s begun to stagnate with the last few versions of OS X (Mail is free with OS X Mavericks). The latest incarnation trickles in a few new features, including the welcome ability to search by attachments and attachment types. And, as befits an Apple program, it’s well-integrated with the rest of OS X. It’s also the only client in this review to natively support Microsoft Exchange accounts, although Outlook’s increasing support for IMAP renders that a bit moot. Alas, the latest version was plagued by troubles with Gmail, and Apple has released updates that address many of the problems.
But wouldn't it be nice if it simply just worked? MailMate Like a mighty rhinoceros, the $30 ( ) won’t win any beauty contests; it’s not what you’d call “approachable”; and it’s astonishingly powerful. Its gray, austere, text-only interface conceals jaw-dropping abilities to search, sort, and sift massive piles of mail. Its support for SpamSieve and PGP, and its unbelievably granular search categories—like “level of server domain”—make MailMate the undisputed best email pick for power users, but probably a needlessly intimidating choice for everyday users.
Bottom line Even if you only want a simple, no-frills email experience, you don’t have to stick with Apple Mail. Inky’s a great free alternative for folks who just want a streamlined inbox presented in a friendly way. On the other end of the spectrum, MailMate is ideal for tech-savvy experienced users who want to rule their inbox like a cruel, all-powerful god. And right at the happy medium between those extremes, Postbox offers plenty of easy-to-use enhancements for a fair price.