Best Email Client For macOS

There are a number of solid email clients available for macOS (aka Mac OS X) but there are a handful of clients that stand out. Whether you want a rock-solid basic email client or a more elaborate system for organization and automation to take control of your email, we’ll help you choose the right email client for your needs as a Mac user.

Apple Mail: Default Email Client for Mac

Apple Mail usually referred to as just “Mail,” is the built-in email client installed by Apple on every Mac computer. Right away, Apple Mail has the advantage of convenience. It’s installed already so you can start using it immediately.

Apple Mail’s easy to set up for one or more email accounts and easy to use. It just works. If you’ve used other mail clients such as Outlook, you can learn how to use Apple Mail in minutes.

As your Mac’s official email program, it’d be hard to go wrong just going with the default. Unless you need some specific features that Apple Mail lacks or if you want something a bit fancier, we recommend just staying with the tried and true Apple Mail. It’s not perfect but it works well and it’s free.

It works well with all mailbox providers and email hosting services, including Gmail. So if you’re tired of using the Gmail web interface, you can easily switch over to Apple Mail.

As you’d expect, Apple Mail works with all the major mailbox providers such as Apple iCloud Mail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Office 365 (Microsoft Exchange), and AOL Mail, and all email hosting services.

Apple Mail is a standard email client but it does have a notable mail filtering feature enabling you to filter mail based on criteria of your choice. You can filter mail from specific people, unread messages, read, messages, you name it, in order to work efficiently.

The one drawback that people complain about is that Apple Mail’s search feature doesn’t work that well with Gmail. This used to be a real problem but it seems to be mostly resolved but if you can’t find an important Gmail email, you might want to use the web client to do another search. You may find an email using the web client for Gmail that you were not able to find in the Apple Mail client.

Note: With IMAP your emails are stored on the server so you can continue to use the Gmail web client and, of course, read your email on your mobile devices. All modern email programs support IMAP and most still support POP3, a protocol whereby you download your email to your local machine rather than storing it on the email server usually in a mailbox provider account such as Gmail and Microsoft Office 365.

Airmail: Full Featured Email Client for Mac

AirMail is an alternative email client for macOS that has a user interface that has many of the same shortcuts and features as Gmail’s web interface. So if you’re experienced with Gmail’s web interface and want to transition to a client without much of a learning curve, then Airmail’s an excellent choice. Airmail users swear by the organization and efficiency features built into Airmail’s interface.

While this article focuses on macOS, it’s worth noting that Airmail works well on the Apple iPhone and iPad, so if you’re an Apple user, Airmail can take care of your mail on all your devices.

Airmail is for people who want to spend some time upfront setting up an organized mailbox and automated actions in order to save time later and stay organized under a flood of email that most of us receive every day.

You can simplify your email workflow then custom actions, and combine steps into a custom action that is not unlike a macro (series of steps) that you can execute any time you want. And with one click you can apply a label to an email, forward it, or archive it.

Airmail makes it easy to stay on top of your mail by organizing threads by subject. You can click “Quick Reply” to write and send a quick email or click “Full” reply to open a new window and write a more involved email.

As with Apple Mail, it’s easy to drag and drop attachments into your emails, which cuts back on the number of steps required to send an email with an attachment.

And like Gmail, Airmail enables you to snooze emails that you don’t have time for right now but that you do not want to forget about. Snoozed emails re-appear at the appointed time and are too prominent to miss so you don’t let important emails fall through the cracks.

Many of Airmail’s features are free but for the full-featured mail client, you’ll pay $9.99/year or $2.99/month after a free trial. While Apple Mail is free, many users think that Airmail is well worth the low price point.

Mozilla Thunderbird: Cross-Platform Email Client

The creators of the Mozilla Firefox web browser developed the Thunderbird email client. Thunderbird email client is one of the oldest mail clients available. The setup process is very easy even though the software is a little slow. There are several great features, including being able to tab emails creating a feeling like you use when using Firefox and Chrome Internet browsers.

Thunderbird is a cross-platform program meaning it works on any platform, including macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Now that we’ve covered the top mail clients that will work on your Mac, let’s take a quick look at a couple of boutique email clients that aren’t quite as popular but have devoted followings because they do one thing very well: Unibox makes it very easy to keep your email organized and Sparrow makes it easy to integrate with Facebook.

Unibox Email Client

Unibox is one of the best macOS email clients that focus more on email organization. It’s more than just sending and receiving mail with Unibox, the main feature of Unibox is the ability to filter emails by contacts. Also, you have the ability to preview attachments in your email instead of having to download them first. The ability to preview attachments makes it much faster when you have limited time checking emails.

Sparrow Email Client with Facebook Integration

Sparrow is a great email client for Mac that allows you to quickly and easily clean your inbox within the app without having to do many complicated proceeders.

It has been recently bought by Google and there should be great new features coming to Sparrow in the future. Sparrow allows for a Facebook connection which makes it a great bonus feature. The focus of Sparrow is to provide a clutter-free environment for email, and you will notice the same as soon as you start working on an email in the app.

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Do you have a favorite email client for macOS? If so, please tell us what and why you like it in a comment below!