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. Garmin nuvi 205 driver for mac. 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.

A Powerful Minimal Email Client For Mac Free

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. 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 features state-of-the-art data recovery software algorithms capable of 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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.