How To Pick the Best Mac-friendly Mail Client
Which email software is best suited for the way you work? We put six Mac-friendly email clients through their paces.
Email is short for “electronic mail”--of course--but these, days that “e” might as well stand for “everyday” or even “essential” since that’s how much we use it. It’s absolutely our preferred form of communication and has been for years--it’s hard to remember the last time the mailman delivered an honest-to-goodness paper letter.
But even if it’s a given that we’re all constantly sending and receiving email, what’s less obvious is which of the Mac-friendly email clients is the best fit for each user’s situation. Maybe you need a client that can capably handle multiple accounts, or perhaps you need one that can fetch messages from your company’s Microsoft Exchange server. Maybe you want one that can meticulously sort all your incoming email instead of dumping it all straight into your inbox.
To find out which deserves to handle all your correspondence, we compared six Mac clients—from humble freebie Thunderbird to top-of-the-line Microsoft Outlook. Well, not all your correspondence—for any handwritten letters you might still scrawl on parchment with your fountain pen in a fit of nostalgia, you’re on your own.
Despite the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, email remains something that we all use every day. And while more and more people have been using web-based clients such as Hotmail and Gmail over the past few years, a rich, desktop-based client still has some key advantages.
Using a desktop client gives you a local copy of your emails, which lets you view them even when you’re offline—and although it might amaze some, there are still plenty of occasions when an internet connection simply refuses to connect.
In this test, we looked at six of the best desktop email clients on the Mac. Apple Mail comes with every copy of OS X and has improved over the years from a bare-bones email client to a more powerful product. Outlook 2011 is the latest email client from Microsoft, replacing Entourage in the newest version of Office.
Mozilla Thunderbird is an open-source email client from the team responsible for Firefox, and it includes plenty of powerful features. Lesser-knowns PowerMail, GyazMail, and Mailsmith complete our lineup.
All of these clients have strengths and weaknesses, but we’ve chosen to focus on ease of use, support for different email protocols, filtering, and spam handling. Let’s take a look…
Exchange Support: WHAT IT MEANS
Two of the products we tested, Mail and Outlook, offer support for Microsoft Exchange servers. Exchange is a widely used piece of server software in the business world that, as well as handling email, also includes support for shared contacts, calendars, and folders for files.
Exchange lets you easily schedule meetings with other server users.
When Apple launched MobileMe in 2008, Steve Jobs described it as “Exchange for the rest of us,” and there are similarities between the products. Both go beyond email to also store contacts and calendars online, enabling all your devices to keep in sync with the same information at all times. Both systems also support “push” email to an iPhone. If your business utilizes Exchange, then you should choose either Mail or Outlook. Of the two, Outlook offers more comprehensive support for Exchange servers, including task and note syncing in addition to email, calendar, and contacts.
Both, though, enable you to use one of Exchange’s most useful features: the ability to schedule meetings with other users on the same server and check when they are free to attend the meeting.
EMAIL CLIENTS: AT A GLANCE
Did you know?
The first spam email was sent in 1978. A Commtouch Software report estimated the number of spam emails sent in January 2010 as 183 billion per day. It is said that the “spam” moniker was inspired by a sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
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itscoley
January 20, 2011 at 7:13am
Why was Postbox not included? In my opinion it is leagues better than Mail.
torpeau
January 13, 2011 at 1:09pm
You should have tested for speed of downloading messages and search speed. PowerMail is ultra fast!! Have used PM since I left Emailer and went to OS X years ago.
idrawu2
January 05, 2011 at 12:48pm
As a power user and professional computer consultant I think that skipping any Email client and using webmail is the way to go. I have found that Apple Mail, Outlook, Entourage & Thunderbird have been painfully annoying to the point where I don't use them at all anymore. Being a computer consultant, I have to deal with other peoples Email problems all day. Gmail's web based Email is safe, has a fabulous SPAM filter and as long as my iPhone is set up as IMAP, I never lose ANYTHING. That seems like it should be normal right? It's not. Transferring Email messages from one computer to another - in Mac or Windows - I know - Eweee - What can I say? Microsoft helps pays the bills - Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Apple Mail, Entourage whatever, they all SUCK. IMAP in Gmail rules, but moving from POP to IMAP is pretty tricky. AOL is horrible and Hotmail, Yahoo! and MSN are close runners up for awful. "But I've had my AOL address for over 15 years!" No problem you can pull your AOL into Gmail.
edwinblaw
January 04, 2011 at 3:14pm
Hey, guys and gals, the subject is one I am really curious about, but the choices made were not those which I would have thought were the most popular.
I'm using Mail since dropping Microsoft Office some time ago. I have briefly tried gmail and yahoo. Have never felt AOL works well with Mac.
Not familiar with the others mentioned. Maybe I missed them in MacLife although I read almost every word that isn't about the iPhone and even some of that if it looks like it would apply to my iPad.
Have you ever considered adding techs like like Gordon Ung or others at MaxPC? When we have a hardware problem it is very difficult to get help .. AppleCare tries but even at upper levels they are not "hackers."
e.g. I'm having a real problem with a second monitor creating an erratic Mighty Mouse and unless set each time it is started to it's native resolution by mirroring it flashes. The Mac OS doesn't provide a method to set custom resolutions or frequencies. I have SwitchRes X but ...
Abandoned the "PC" five years ago after 22 years of DOS and Windows; but, still take MaxPC for it's tech value and accessories which are not covered in Mac mags. after 22
respectfully,ed in Pensacola
Mr. Happypants
January 03, 2011 at 6:49pm
I just LOVE the irony of talking about spam control in email and then well - you know. Highlarious!!
And, what the hell - I use Thunderbird at work and love it. For personal email, it's all web-based.
TigerMO
January 03, 2011 at 6:21pm
I wish that Mac|Life would either find a way to prevent spam mail from showing up in their comment section or have a way to remove it after it appears. It's annoying. OR, if Mac|Life is the source of the spam comments, then I say, "Knock it off! I get enough junk already!"
differentvoice
January 03, 2011 at 6:18pm
You should have reviewed another one, which I definitely think is superior to Mail in nearly every respect: Postbox, which recently came out with version 2. http://www.postbox-inc.com
I switched about 6 months ago and can't think of any good reason to go back to Mail. There are discount codes on facebook & Twitter so you can save $10 off the cost, too.
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