As popular as online email services such as Gmail are, they are far from being as convenient as dedicated desktop email clients. With a desktop email client, you can enjoy more features, such as offline access to your emails and contacts, excellent integration with the rest of the operating system and other software applications, and more.
Mac users have it particularly great when it comes to desktop email clients because there’s a lot to choose from. In fact, some may find the sheer selection of Mac email clients overwhelming. How do you know which email clients for Mac you can trust with your personal and business correspondence? Our list of top 10 best email clients for Mac is here to help you.
The app, available for both iOS and Mac, offers a range of advanced productivity tools including email tracking, send later and read later, all from a tidy interface.
Mac Email Recovery
Before we get to our list and tell you what’s the best email app for Mac, we want to say a few words about email recovery. Perhaps due to the huge amount of spam the average computer user receives every day, people often take for granted just how much invaluable information emails contain. From login credentials to bank account statements to business correspondents to private conversations with loved ones — emails are the unbound memoirs of our modern lives.
You should create regular email backups and store them as safely and securely as possible. It’s a good idea to automate the backup process so you don’t need to think about it all the time and still be able to rest assured knowing that you have up-to-date copies of all your emails.
But sometimes even an automatic email backup solution isn’t fast enough to create backup copies of your emails before your hard drive decides to give up or you become a victim of a malware attack. In that situation, your only hope is a data recovery software solution like Disk Drill.
Disk Drill features state-of-the-art data recovery software algorithms capable of recovering lost emails from all storage devices. Disk Drill is a user-friendly solution with an interface design worthy of the macOS operating system. Go to Disk Drill’s website to download the software for free to see how it works for you.
10 Best Email Apps for Mac
1. Apple Mail
Apple Mail, also known simply as the Mail app, is the default email client on macOS. As is characteristic for apps from Apple, the Mail app is a simple, polished piece of software designed to streamline your email conversations and make your life easier with search filters and support for multiple email accounts.
Since macOS Sierra, the Mail app supports Siri, allowing you to have Siri read your emails to you. You can also tell the intelligent personal assistant to send a quick email for you.
The Mail app is intuitive, capable, and it’s right instantly available on every Mac computer. Unless you have very specific requirements which the Mail app doesn’t meet, we don’t see a reason to use a different email client. It’s no surprise that the best Mac email client comes from Apple.
2. Microsoft Outlook
We understand that for some of you, Microsoft Outlook will be forever associated with email viruses, corporate memos, and some of the worst examples of interface design clutter.
Microsoft is aware of the unfortunate image of its email client, and the company is actively trying to change it. Outlook 2016 was the best email client for Mac 2016 in the category of business email clients, and it has ended in the second place overall this year.
Outlook’s user interface is getting better with each year, and no other email client comes even close when it comes to the broad range of features Outlook offers.
From the ability to manage multiple inboxes to the all-in-one calendar management feature to the fantastic integration with Microsoft Office — Outlook is the undisputed king of business email clients, and it’s also a great choice for Office 365 users who are looking for extra features and fantastic reliability.
3. Mozilla Thunderbird
Even though Mozilla no longer actively develops Thunderbird, this free and open source email client is still one of the best email clients for Mac.
The first version of Thunderbird was released in 2004, receiving more than 1 million downloads in the first 10 days of release.
Thunderbird is more than an email client; it’s a personal information manager with an RSS reader, IRC chat, extensions, and sophisticated email filtering capabilities.
Thunderbird users love the ability to make Thunderbird exactly what they want it to be just as much as they enjoy the fact that Thunderbird works great right out of the box. Because Thunderbird has been around for such a long time, the application is highly polished, and virtually free of bugs.
4. Postbox
Postbox is a perfect email client for power-users who desire customizability, elegant design, and powerful features.
The biggest problem that users face when dealing with emails is figuring out an effective way how to separate important emails from marketing spam.
Postbox has an email categorization system that feels instantly familiar yet does things just a bit smarter than other email clients. If you spend a lot of time every day writing the same email responses over and over again, you will like the 70 professionally written email templates that come with Postbox for free.
The templates have customizable placeholders for names, job titles, dates, and other things, allowing you to dramatically reduce the time you spend doing things you don’t enjoy so that you can spend more time doing the things that make the biggest difference.
5. Nylas Mail
Nylas Mail is a free, open source email app for Mac, Linux, and Windows. When you first open Nylas Mail, you will be greeted with a setup wizard window that will allow you to easily add any of your email accounts.
You can choose between a Gmail-like view and an Outlook-like view with a side panel. Regardless of which view you choose, Nylas Mail will surprise you with its excellent email composition panel and enriched contacts. An email address with the name of the person behind it doesn’t tell you much, unless you already know the person.
That’s why Nylas Mail automatically gathers all relevant contact information from social media websites and sites like GitHub and makes it instantly available so that you can better distinguish important emails from those that can wait just a while longer.
6. Airmail
Airmail is a winner of Apple Design Award, and it’s not hard to see why Apple picked it. While most email clients, even those that claim to be innovative and modern, stick with the same layout that has been around since the early days of Microsoft Outlook, Airmail does things differently.
The app was designed from the ground up to allow users to process their emails without interruption, regardless of whether they have only a single email account or a dozen. Airmail supports all popular online email services, it features per account notifications, offline email access, custom global shortcuts, cloud storage support, and more.
7. Spark
Are you overwhelmed by the huge number of emails you get every day? Then you need an email client that will help you get through them quickly and painlessly. Spark features a smart, unified inbox that collects all your emails and automatically categorizes them for easy processing. Spark also supports smart notifications, widgets, integration with other services, and much more. Use it on your MacBook, iPad, or iPhone.
8. Polymail
Polymail is more than an email client; it’s a sales platform with support for email analytics and personalized email campaigns to multiple prospects at once. Polymail seamlessly integrates with Salesforce, and you can easily connect it to all popular online email services. Polymail uses the pay-as-you-go payment method, starting at $10 a month for the Pro edition. Teams who want to take advantage of Polymail’s collaboration features can either pay $16 a month per user for the Teams edition or $49 a month per user for the more capable Enterprise edition.
9. Canary Mail
Canary Mail is a beautiful email app for Mac and iOS with two themes and customizable keyboard shortcuts. But Canary Mail actually isn’t just about design and usability; it’s also about security and privacy. Canary Mail offers PGP encryption out of the box, allowing you to encrypt all your email conversations with the same encryption that allowed Edward Snowden to hide his communication from NSA. But unlike the tools used by Snowden, Canary Mail makes PGP encryption highly intuitive.
10. Unibox
If you think about it, traditional email clients behave in a very unintuitive way. Even though most people exchange emails with a relatively small number of people, emails are either grouped into conversations based on the email subject, or they are not grouped at all. Why not group emails by the sender just like text messages? That’s exactly what Unibox offers. This email client allows you to concentrate on the actual communication with the people you know, instead of forcing you to waste time on email management.
Mailbird – Best Alternative for Windows
Mailbird is a mail client for the Windows operating system. It is a powerful tool whose elegant design would not look out of place on a Mac. Within the first five minutes of use, you will feel at home with its intuitive interface and start to manage your email in a more efficient way.
Mailbird is packed with features that allow you to streamline the way you handle your email and contacts. Combine all your email accounts into one unified inbox to simplify your day and take advantage of the built-in apps to integrate with Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and many other sites. An integrated speed reader helps you quickly review your inbox and you can snooze messages that you may want to give more attention to at a later time.
You can customize your Mailbird experience with a wide variety of color themes and custom sounds. The application includes a powerful attachment search feature as well as a direct connection between your contact list and inbox.
Free 24/7 email support is offered and Mailbird supports 17 languages from across the globe.
You can download the Lite version of this app for free which supports all common servers and the contacts manager. Upgrading to the Pro version makes all of the features available.
Email is, in many ways, the hub of modern life. Finding the best email app for your needs is key to a having a more manageable and productive digital experience, whether you're communicating with friends or restoring forgotten passwords. With Google's recent announcement that it will pull the plug on Inbox by Gmail in March 2019, and both Newton and Astro meeting their makers even sooner, you may be in the market for a replacement.
The best email apps help you manage the most important aspects of your digital life without making them more complicated. Some let you turn your inbox into a to-do list. Others are deeply customizable, giving you greater control. What makes the best email apps different from one another, and which one is right for you?
What Makes a Great Email App?
For this list of the best email apps, we only considered email clients, leaving out email services and email assistant apps. An email client is a piece of software you install on your computer or mobile device to access email, even if that email is hosted by another service. An example is the Mail app that comes pre-installed on iOS devices. By way of the Mail app, you can access a Gmail account and a Yahoo Mail account. Gmail and Yahoo Mail in this case would be email services, which we did not consider for this list of the best email apps. Client apps almost always let you access multiple email accounts, giving you the option to see all your messages in one consolidate view.
We also homed in on email apps for personal use, which nixed from consideration a few apps that tend to be more prominent in the business world, such as Microsoft Outlook (desktop app) and IBM Notes. They both have their place among email aficionados but tend to be more well suited for organizations than individuals.
As mentioned, we did not consider email assistant apps, or services that work within your existing email to make it better in some targeted way. An example is SaneBox, a service that works inside your existing email service to automatically sorts incoming messages (among other things). Another example is Boomerang, which adds new features and tools to Gmail and Outlook that help improve your writing and help you remember when to follow-up on messages. Both these apps are highly capable, but they aren't clients and so they weren't considered for this list.
There can be some confusion about email clients and services, however, because some apps cover both ground. Gmail, for instance, is not just an email service but also has a mobile email client app by the same name. The Gmail mobile app lets you read and reply to messages from not only your Gmail account, but also your Yahoo Mail address, Microsoft Office 365 account, and others.
In addition to being email clients, the apps in this list meet other criteria, such as being in a state of full release. In other words, no beta products allowed. (Don't worry. We have an eye on some of the more interesting email apps in the works, such as Pigeon and Superhuman. But we can't accurately assess them until they're fully released.) Ease of use played a major role in our decision-making, as did stability. We also looked for apps that had at least one standout feature or reason for choosing it, which is listed in the 'best for' line in each app's description below. Finally, if you're in search of an app with a specific feature in mind, see the comparison table at the end of this article.
When it comes to email apps, there's no reason you can't choose several to use for different purposes. You might have one app you adore installed on your personal computer, something else for work email, and yet another on your phone. Which ones you choose will depend on how you like to interact with your email and what you do with it. Whatever the case, the best email apps have you covered.
The 15 Best Email Apps
- Airmail (iOS, macOS)
- Edison Mail (Android, iOS)
- eM Client (Windows)
- Front (Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, web)
- Gmail for Mobile (Android, iOS)
- Mail and Calendar by Microsoft (Windows)
- Mail by Apple (iOS, macOS)
- Mailbird (Windows)
- MailMate (macOS)
- Outlook Mobile (Android, iOS)
- Polymail (iOS, macOS, web)
- Postbox (macOS, Windows)
- Spark (iOS, macOS)
- Spike (Android, iOS)
- Thunderbird (Linux, macOS, Windows)
Airmail (iOS, macOS)
Best email app for customizing your inbox
Airmail started out as a simple email app, but over time, it grew with features, and today it's one of the most powerful email client apps available. Customizable notifications make sure you only get alerts when you receive emails from your most important contacts. Swipe gestures are also customizable. Airmail can help you write faster, with built-in templates for your most-used responses. And, it works with your favorite productivity apps, including Fantastical, Evernote, OmniFocus, Dropbox, and others.
Price: $4.99, $9.99
Edison Mail (Android, iOS)
Best email app for categorizing messages automatically
Edison Mail is a mobile email client app designed to give you assistance with sorting and organizing your email. It can automatically sort incoming messages into appropriate groups, such as messages that contain tracking numbers for shipping, those pertaining to subscriptions, and receipts. An undo-send button gives the app universal appeal, and option to turn off read receipts make Edison even more valuable to people to like to be in control of their email. Don't confuse this app with the Edison Assistant (formerly called EasilyDo or Smart Assistant by EasilyDo), as the latter is does more to help you organize your life beyond email alone.
Price: free
eM Client (Windows)
Best Email Application For Gmail
Best email app for merging email, calendar, contacts, tasks
If you're looking for a powerhouse of an email app for Windows, eM Client is a great option. It not only combines email, calendar, contacts, and tasks in one place, but also supports touch interfaces. While the price for a Pro account may sound a little steep, eM Client offers some functionality that's rarely found in other email apps, such as language translation. That's reason enough to choose eM Client if you frequently send and receive messages in multiple languages and aren't fluent in all of them.
Price: free; $49.95 for Pro
Front
Best email app for team collaboration
Front app lets teams manage a single inbox collaboratively. With Front, you connect shared inboxes, such as catchall addresses like contact@company.com, and then anyone with access can answer or assign messages for other people on the team to answer. Front also lets you connect social media accounts, which teams may also tend to collaboratively.
Price: from $15/month per person, minimum 2 people
Gmail Mobile (Android, iOS)
Best email app for searching and organizing messages
While Gmail is the gold standard among webmail services, its mobile app is surprisingly light on features. But that's not the deciding factor on whether to choose the Gmail app for your phone. The real selling point of this app is how fast and capable it is at searching even the most bloated inboxes. When you use it with a Gmail account (or two; it supports multiple Gmail addresses), you get the same great options for automatically sorting mail into tabs that the service creates for you: Primary, Social, and Updates. With limitless ways to sort mail with filters and labels and exceptional spam filtering, Gmail makes it a breeze to see your most important messages quickly.
Price: free
Mail and Calendar by Microsoft (Windows; mobile equivalent is Outlook Mobile)
Best email app for keeping email simple
Mail and Calendar by Microsoft is a Windows desktop app that keeps email simple. Formerly called Outlook Express, this app covers the basics of email without adding excessive features. It offers threaded email conversations, notifications, and flags to mark your most important messages, along with Outlook-style calendar integration. It's also touch-enabled. If you're a Windows users who prefers to not be distracted by added features, it's a good option.
Price: free
Mail by Apple (iOS, macOS)
Best email app for annotating images, signing documents
The Mail app that comes preinstalled on iOS devices and most Macs may seem like a basic email client, but its simplicity belies the powerful tools under the hood. With its Markup tools, you can add annotations to images and sign documents right from your inbox. You can also use Apple's Mail Drop feature (the same one that works with iCloud) to send extremely large attachments without it eating into your allotted email storage space.
Price: included with Mac and iOS devices
Mailbird (Windows)
Best email app for increasing productivity with integrations
Mailbird is a Windows email app with a contemporary design. You can personalize your inbox with custom layouts and sidebar themes. It also includes integration options with popular productivity apps, such as Asana, Todoist, Slack, and others. While rich with features, such as the ability to snooze messages until later and automated scrolling for speed readers, some advanced capabilities are restricted to higher tiers of service. For example, an undo send option is only available to Mailbird Business subscribers.
Price: free limited version, $12/year for Pro, $59 for lifetime Pro, $20/month per person for Business
MailMate (macOS)
Best email app for composing in markdown
Well suited for those who love plain text and keyboard shortcuts, MailMate lets you jump through your inbox without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. It also supports Markdown formatting and unique views, such as the ability to surface all messages that are similar to the message you're currently viewing. MailMate is perhaps the best Mac email app for power users who value plain text over features such as snooze and undo send.
Price: $49.99
Outlook Mobile (Android, iOS)
Best Email App For Mac Free
Best email app for viewing a focused inbox
Thunderbird
While the Outlook desktop app is as powerful as it is bloated with features, the Outlook Mobile app offers quite a different experience. When you use it with a Microsoft email account, you can take advantage of its Focused Inbox view, which automatically finds emails that are likely to be important to you and filters out other distracting messages, keeping them in a tab called Other. The Outlook mobile app also has customizable swipe gestures for deleting, archiving, marking as read, flagging, moving, and snoozing messages (the snooze function is actually called 'schedule,' but it would be snooze in any other app).
Price: free
Polymail (iOS, macOS, web)
Best email app for collaborating with a sales team
Polymail's strong suit is that you can use it collaboratively, especially among sales teams. Create email templates, for example, and you can share them with everyone on a team. For groups that use Salesforce, you can connect the two apps and get information you need from Salesforce while writing messages. Teams can also track email stats together to see how much time everyone spends in their inboxes, or how likely each person is to get a reply. Another great feature is Polymail's ability to watch and report back when recipients open your messages, and who among them downloads attachments you send. You'll also notice in the chart below that Polymail is packed with features, everything from the ability to snooze a message until later to an undo send button.
Price: free; paid plans from $13/month
Postbox (macOS, Windows)
Best email app for organizing multiple inboxes
Since its inception as a spin-off of Mozilla's Thunderbird, Postbox has grown into a powerful app, rich with options for keeping your mail organized. A tabbed interface lets you keep multiple messages open at once. Tags and folders help you categorize and sort mail. Another stellar capability is how Postbox can display a contact info sidebar, letting you dig into the detail about the sender. There's a lot to explore in this powerful and well designed app.
Price: $40
Spark (iOS, macOS)
Best email app for cutting down time spent in email
Every email doesn't need a lengthy reply. Sometimes a thumbs-up or crying face is all you need. With Spark, that's all you have to send, and in the end, that saves you time. After you read an email, tap Quick Reply to send an instant emoji response and archive the message in one step. Spark also saves you time in how it handles calendar invitations. Instead of a standard invite email, Spark shows you a preview of the event in your calendar with Accept and Reject options. This app has a wealth of other features, too, such as undo send, snooze, reminders, and more.
Price: free
Spike (Android, iOS)
Best email app for making email more like messaging
If you prefer text messaging or team chat to email, Spike (formerly Hop) is worth a try. This email client for Android and iOS devices turns message threads into chat-like conversations, so your emails look less like a verbose expanse of text and more like what you see in iMessage or WhatsApp, with GIFs, voice memos, one-tap image sharing, and everything else you'd expect in a chat app. And similar to team chat apps, Spike lets you create channels for organizing conversations around a certain topic. Spike works best when you use it to message with other people who are also using it, too.
Price: free
Thunderbird (Linux, macOS, Windows)
Best email app for working in tabs
From the makers of Firefox comes an email application that copies one of the best features of web browsers: tabs. Thunderbird isn't the only email client to use a tabbed interface, but it is one of the best. When you quit the app, Thunderbird saves your open tabs and reloads them the next time you launch it. An extensive collection of add-ons let you expand what Thunderbird can do.
Price: free
Originally published 2 June 2015 by Paula DuPont; updated in 2017 and 2018 with new apps and current information. Zapier senior writer and editor Matthew Guay contributed to this article.