Advertisement Every Mac comes with a free email application, appropriately named Mail. Using the native Mail application is fine for most people, especially for those who only use, but things get trickier when you’re dealing with multiple email accounts. For Gmail users in particular, more thorough solutions are available, many which are free. Here’s a look at five Mail alternatives and why they might work for you. ($10) Marketed as being a “lighting-fast email client for Mac,” AirMail is also the most beautiful application on the list. Offering Split Screen support for OS X El Capitan, the application looks and feels like it’s an Apple creation. It also features some options not available on the native Mac application, which consistently makes From email clients to system utilities, time savers to productivity boons; on this page you'll find the best Mac software used by MakeUseOf staff and readers alike.

Chief among this is the ability to compose in Markdown or HTML. As you type on the left, the result is shown on the right side of the screen. Being able to view the formats side-by-side means you can make sure to remove broken links or weird-looking text before sending. In AirMail, received messages may be organized by task.

You can mark each email as To Do, Memo, or Done. The first are for items that require some action or a follow-up. A Memo is for items you need to memorize or store for later, and you can mark completed emails as Done. You can also Snooze messages, allowing you to move them to the side for viewing at a later time or date.

Email Software Mac

The application offers support for Google, iCloud, Exchange, Yahoo, Outlook, AOL, IMAP, and POP. It also works with many third-party integrations, including Dropbox, Google Drive, OmniFocus, Things,. AirMail is available in the Mac App Store. You can also for free from the developer’s website. An AirMail for iPhone app is coming soon.

Mail Pilot 2 ($20) Like AirMail, Mail Pilot 2 turns mail into a to-do list, allowing you to focus on what’s most important. Unique to Mail Pilot 2 is a relatively new feature called Dash. With Dash, your daily life is summarized on a dashboard to help you become more productive.

It includes the number of messages that you have received in the past 24 hours, plus those that are completed, set aside, due, and late. Dash also summarizes the average time it takes for you to reply to emails and more.

Another handy feature provides links to files that you’ve recently sent or received, which is very nice. The application supports all standard IMAP accounts, including Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, AOL, Rackspace, Outlook.com, and Google Apps.

Mail Pilot 2 is available in the Mac App Store. A $9.99 iOS version is available from the App Store. Do you want to learn more about Mail Pilot? Like the mobile version of the app, Mail Pilot for Mac is very useful for managing important email like a to-do list. ($10) Postbox is Postbox is an email management application for Windows and Mac powered by the Mozilla platform.

On our list, but it’s also a very stable product. Postbox’s goal is to remove some of the chaos associated with mail, by offering robust tools to make the process more efficient. One of Postbox’s nicest features is the ability to group messages by topic. This allows you to break work into smaller, more manageable chunks. Grouping by subject is particularly useful when you have more than one email account. Postbox also enables you to create Pre-Made Responses, which you can reuse as often as needed. Postbox works with most email providers including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and iCloud.

It also supports POP3, IMAP, and SMTP protocols. It is available from the Postbox website. A 30-day free trial is also available, so you can try before you buy. (free) This mail client only recently arrived on OS X after Like the mobile version of the app, Mail Pilot for Mac is very useful for managing important email like a to-do list. Dubbed “simple, beautiful & blazing fast” by its creators, the application features a transparent user interface, free of fancy buttons or slides.

Free Email For Mac

This approach works well, especially if you have to go through a lot of emails each day or have multiple accounts. We especially like the application’s shortcut buttons, which allow you to move quickly to the next or previous email.

CloudMagic offers support for Gmail, Exchange, Google Apps, Yahoo, Outlook, iCloud, and all IMAP accounts. It’s available in the Mac App Store. And are also available. Both are free. Nylas N1 (free) Two of most popular third-party mail clients in recent years were Sparrow and Mailbox. After each was purchased by Google and Dropbox respectively, both were eventually shutdown, leaving millions of users in the lurch. By contrast, Nylas N1 is open-source and published on GitHub, meaning it will never be bought and axed.

Nylas N1 is the closest thing you’ll see to a next-generation mail program. It features a clean user interface, supports Gmail keyboard shortcuts, and best of all, because it is open-source, has a community to back it up.

However, because it’s so new, you may run into some problems, at least in the short-run. For example, N1 doesn’t currently offer a unified inbox and the formatting isn’t quite right. Why is N1 on our list? Because it’s been designed for easy modification. Best of all, it can run on multiple platforms including OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Better still — it’s free. N1 is compatible with many providers, including Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, Microsoft Exchange, and more. Currently, there is no N1 app for iOS.

You’ve Got Mail Options If you’re happy with Apple’s default email client, keep it. For those looking for different ways to organize your mail or rather use something that plays nicer with Gmail, consider one of our alternatives. The most feature-rich solutions on the list are AirMail and Mail Pilot 2. The ones most likely to push mail into new areas in the next year are CloudMagic and Nylas N1. Looking for a reliable, stable solution? Consider Postmate.

Are you looking for more ways to customize your email experience on a Mac? Think you've found all the new features in El Capitan? There is a bounty of handy features that haven't gotten a lot of press., or Everyone is still trying to solve the email problem. So, let's also talk about the most basic habit of all – the art of writing better emails. With the help of some cool tools. Which email client for Mac do you use? Let us know in the comments below.

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We don't come to bury Apple Mail —but we do come to praise its alternatives. While the free email app that comes on every Mac is grossly under appreciated, there are features it lacks. There are people it doesn't suit, either, and that can be both because of how it looks and the way it works. There are alternatives, however, and that is excellent. If you listen to any developer of any of these rival offerings though, they will say the same things. Obviously they'll hype up their differences or improvements over Apple Mail and clearly they'll also at least gently rubbish that macOS staple.

They'd never get you to even look at their apps if they didn't do both of these. One more thing they tend to try, though, is to make you think that you should jump ship completely.

Each one is claimed to be a total replacement for Apple Mail and they certainly can be. They just don't have to.

You can and we're going to end up recommending that you use two email apps. One of them is Apple Mail. What the other is depends on how you use email, how much you get of it and just a little bit on how your brain happens to work. Just as we aren't going to analyse your head, we're also not going to catalog every possible email app available.

What we can do, though, is pick out types of email that suits types of people. Just one thing We're talking here specifically about the Apple Mail app or what's called an email client. We're also talking specifically about the Mac version as iOS is a very different subject. What we're not talking about, though is the email service that you use. Apple Mail is also a service: is the system by which you get your @icloud.com address and by which you send and receive emails. There are many email services with the main ones being Apple's iCloud, Microsoft Exchange or Google Mail. The Apple Mail app will work with just about any email service provider you can find.

So here we're focusing on what that app can do and what it can't —or what is done better by alternatives. We're focusing on who these rival apps are best for. The minimalist emailer Really if you just get a few emails a day then apart from envying you, we also recommend that you stick with Apple Mail. That's especially true if you then don't tend to do much with those emails: if you just have to read them and not particularly act on them.

Best Email Software For Mac

You could use any of the email apps we mention and a dozen more to do this but you wouldn't see any advantage. You might, too, see disadvantages as some of the more powerful apps are complex and unnecessarily so for basic use.

Bombarded with emails If you get 30 emails an hour, you're not going to be able to stay on top of them. Even if your full-time job was manning an email support service, you'd struggle so you need to look at email triage. By default, Apple Mail will show you the sender's name, the subject and in theory the first few words of the message. In practice, senders can now change that preview to instead show you any text they like. Consequently email newsletters promoting an event might choose to put its venue and date in there. Anything that means you can look at a message once and immediately see whether you have to do anything about it is a great thing.

Apple Mail also lets you specify that you only want to be interrupted by certain people. It lets you say that you want to hear a bleep when your boss or your client emails but otherwise you get left alone until you're ready to dive into your inbox.

You do that by marking an individual as a VIP. That's an excellent system for how swiftly you can do it. The sender's name in any email you get is a dropdown menu and that contains the option to Add to VIPs.

However, it's no use at all unless you know the specific email address of this most important person. Maybe they use several different ones and you'll have to separately mark each one as a VIP. Or more likely, you need to react quickly to emails that come from anyone working at that client.

Apple Mail's VIP system can't help you there: you have to start looking into Mail rules. The Mac version of Apple Mail has you can give it for how to deal with various messages but there is a problem.

You have to leave Apple Mail running all the time and on a Mac that is switched on all the time. Whereas is replete with powerful options for rules —or what it instead calls filters —and they run before mail even reaches your Mac.

That sounds ideal and it is something we wish Apple would add to its email app but it too comes with a problem. To get this kind of functionality you have to switch email services: instead of using Apple's iCloud Mail, you have to get a Google Gmail account. Just to make this as complicated as possible, you can use the Apple Mail app to read and write emails with your Gmail account. However, Apple Mail isn't great at it and there is no official Gmail app for Mac.

If you'd be happy just using Gmail online in your browser, though, its filters or rules are tempting. There is a and that too needs you to move over to using a different email service.

This time it's Microsoft Exchange and that sorts emails before you get them. It tends to make a guess as to what emails matter to you and which don't, so it's automatically sorting the important ones into a priority inbox within Outlook. It's hard to give up control over your inbox and let an app make decisions on what you want to read, but Outlook is good and gets better the more you use it.

Gmail is and Outlook is provided as part of. Getting things done The busier you are, the more it's likely that you need to actually do things based on the email messages you get. You have to take action that's a bit more involved than just replying.

This is where Apple Mail hurts us the most. We've got Macs running all day so we can have rules set up to deal with things but what we can't easily do is act on messages. It would be great, for instance, if you got a message that you could just pop straight into your To Do list with a click or a swipe. Apple Mail can't do that but by assuming you're initially more interested in who's emailed you than what they've said. No question, if your partner emails and so does a supplier you used a year ago then one of these is going to be urgent and the other probably isn't.

So Unibox displays a list the senders. You have to click on them to see even what the subject heading is.

The result is that the app is slightly more minimalist than Apple Mail and it does appear to be right about our interest. At least, it turns out that a huge number of emails we get we know we can ignore just because the sender is a newsletter whose list we've never been able to get off.

Unibox also has a button for quickly emailing a person. Only, it appears when you've had an email from them. You'd have to be pretty organized to choose to write them a new email instead of just clicking Reply but perhaps you are. Unibox and is also. The way you think Most email apps are aimed at particular types of people. Airmail 3 is for ones who are working and need to actively do things with their email, for instance., though.

It's very definitely for technical people. It presents nearly everything in a barebones, stripped-back look that somehow seems minimal even though it is packed with features and buttons. This is the email app for you if you're ever fussed about seeing the behind-the-scenes source code for an email. It's for seeing as many emails at once as possible. It's just not as user-friendly as others: it isn't as thought-through.

For instance, if you start to forward a message to someone and then change your mind, there isn't a Cancel button. There's only a Delete one and you have to realise that it deletes your unsent email, not the original. Or because it's meant for more technical people, you do get the odd moment when you're left wondering 'yes, and?'

At some dialog box. The spell check one, for instance, can be set to pop up when you hit Send but unless you've got a dictionary installed, it just sits there waiting for you to figure out how to dismiss it. It's not so bad if you do have a dictionary installed but first you have to realise that you need one and then you have to get it. Sometimes when we would go to install a dictionary we'd just get an error.

Speaking of errors Another reason for leaving Apple Mail is that it goes wrong. You will sometimes find messages you archived off popping back into your inbox. Occasionally you'll get error messages that are sufficiently cryptic that you just say OK and carry on. That's especially so when you get the message but Apple Mail appears to have done what you wanted. It's frustrating and it's distracting but unfortunately it's also typical of all email apps. There is no one email app we know of that is rock-solid reliable all the time.

There is no one email app that is powerful enough to be used by everybody. Although, if there were one such app, it would be Apple Mail. Apple Mail add-ons There are companies that don't make alternatives to Apple Mail, they make add-ons or plug-ins that can be used with it.

So Sanebox, for instance, is a service that gives Apple Mail the ability to snooze messages. It's also able to automatically generate reminders for you to chase if someone hasn't replied in a month. That's a subscription service which claims to work with all email apps and all email services. Then there's Mail Act-On which adds keyboard shortcuts for handling your mail faster. It gives you rules for sending mails, too, such as delaying delivery or automatically adding CC recipients. These are both additions that can make Apple Mail itself better.