Mac Program For Mail
A free email client comes installed and ready for use with macOS, and macOS Mail is not a bad program at all. However, you might want to examine its free alternatives. Here are the best free email clients available for macOS. Give them a try.
MacOS Mail
What We Like
Included in the Mac operating system.
Supports smart folders and robust filters.
Markup tools for annotating photos or PDFs email attachments.
VIP user notifications.
What We Don't Like
Basic design that lacks customization features.
No option to snooze emails.
Hasn't had a major design upgrade in years.
The Mail application that ships with macOS and OS X is solid, feature-rich and spam-eliminating software that is also an easy-to-use email client. Optimized to work on the Mac, the Mail app is trouble free and full featured. It can handle all your email accounts in one place.
Spark
What We Like
Clean, modern design.
Quick Replies feature for sending short, templated responses.
Smart mailboxes.
Supports multiple email accounts.
What We Don't Like
Meet the 7 Best Desktop Email Clients for Mac. These are our favorite desktop email clients for Mac, in no particular order. Inky ()Inky talks about itself as being an alternative to Outlook. Ensuring the very 1st position among the best email programs for mac is the Postbox 3. This program is a great mixture of numerous spectacular yet quite handy features. In the most general sense, it provides you with a keenly designed look and a smart key with reliable performance.
Slow tech support.
Questionable privacy policy.
Doesn't support many services.
Spark is an impressive email program that auto-organizes your inboxes and lets you postpone email easily as well as send quick one-click replies. Spark's 'Smart Inbox' bubbles messages that are important to you to the top, and uses categories of Personal, Notifications, and Newsletters.
Spark's scheduling feature allows you to assign a time period during which it will send a particular message. Select from times later today, in the evening, tomorrow, or on any date.
Mailspring
What We Like
Integrates with Gmail, iCloud, Office 365, Outlook, and Yahoo
Supports snoozing.
CPU and battery efficient.
What We Don't Like
Some features limited to paid subscription.
Doesn't support Exchange accounts.
Mandatory Mailspring ID.
Aimed at the professional email user, Mailspring boasts mail merge, reminders, and the option to schedule mail—all available in a pro edition.
With the free version, you get a clean, highly productive and expandable email program that includes thrills such as link and open tracking, quick reply templates, and undo send. However, the free edition is limited to 10 accounts.
Mozilla Thunderbird
What We Like
Flexible filtering system.
Many available plug-ins.
Tabs for navigation.
Easy to configure.
What We Don't Like
Rudimentary design.
Not as user friendly as other clients.
No longer in development.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a full-featured, secure, and functional email client. It lets you handle mail efficiently and filters away junk mail. Thunderbird is no longer in active development except for security updates, but it supplies a streamlined interface and a powerful email package.
Mozilla SeaMonkey
What We Like
All-in-one internet suite that includes email.
Customizable toolbars.
What We Don't Like
Outdated interface.
Some features not intuitive.
No mobile device support.
Never underestimate Mozilla. The company built SeaMonkey, the email component of its open source browser, on the same Mozilla platform as Firefox 51. It delivers HTML5, hardware acceleration, and improved JavaScript speed. It is a solid performer, full featured and usable.
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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
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 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 Gravatar 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.
Choose the preferred program and it will instantly change the default Mac app for that file type. The Change All button will change all file types for that app so. Mac OS X makes it easy to change file associations, which determine what programs are used to open various file types. You can change the setting for individual files or for all files of a specific file type. By Bob LeVitus. Sometimes, if your Mac doesn’t recognize a file type as something that one of its programs can handle, or if you want a specific file type to always open in a specific program, Mac OS X Lion might need a little help from you. How to set program for filetype in mac. Now that you’ve changed the default program for this file, the button for Change All is active. This button will set your Mac to use the selected application to open files of this type. How to set default apps on Mac. How to change the default Mac app for specific file types. Right-click on a file that uses the file type you'd like to change the default for. For example, one with a.jpg extension (a photo). Click on Get Info in the pop-up.
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
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, Inky () 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
The same can be said for Mail Pilot (; Mac App Store link), a $20 email client built loosely around the Getting Things Done 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
Give it a few more versions, and Unibox (; Mac App Store link) 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
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 MailMate () 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.
See a list of email clients available for the Mac
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.
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