TEST ONE: Ease of Use

Setting up an email client can go one of two ways… 

All of the products we tested support the POP protocol, and all except Mailsmith support IMAP as well. Mail and Outlook also support Microsoft Exchange servers. Most will have a go at auto-configuring themselves to your account settings, although results can vary depending on the type of account you use. As expected, Outlook performs well if you’re using it with an Exchange account, but with a Gmail account it requires some tweaking. Likewise, GyazMail, PowerMail, and Mailsmith require a little fiddling to work with Gmail properly.

Mozilla Thunderbird’s setup and configuration process is simple and much improved.

All of the products are easy to use when it comes to day-to-day tasks. Mail and Outlook integrate with calendar systems (built-in and iCal respectively) to create to-do items based on emails. 

Thunderbird, which in its previous incarnations was somewhat tricky to set up, has been much improved. Now the overall interface has been brought up to the kind of standards set by Mail and Outlook.  

TEST TWO: Multiple Accounts

How well does each client handle multiple accounts?

Many users now have multiple email accounts, which makes handling more than one email address important. All of the applications we tested have the ability to handle multiple email accounts. There are two schools of thought about how email clients should handle this task: The first is that every inbox must be kept separate so that you don’t mix work mail with home mail, for example. The second says that everything should end up in the same inbox so you can process all your email quickly and easily.

Mail, Outlook, and Thunderbird give you the option of both methods. With Mail or Outlook, you simply click the Inbox icon at the top of the list, and it places all your inboxes into a unified view. With Thunderbird, you need to click through to its special unified view mode. The other clients keep inboxes separate, although in all cases you can create filters or special views that show you unread mail from all accounts.

From POP to Exchange, Apple Mail proves capable of handling multiple accounts with ease.

TEST THREE: Filtering

How well does each client filter incoming email?

All of the clients include the ability to filter messages as they arrive. Often, this will be used to file incoming mail from a mailing list into a folder to avoid inbox clutter, but filters can do a lot more if given a chance. 

PowerMail includes some extra filtering options that will please power users, such as the ability to automatically save attachments to a specific folder—handy if you receive files from a client and want to ensure they are always saved in a particular place. 

Outlook’s filtering options include the ability to create To Do notes directly from emails.

Outlook enables you to set To Do actions using a filter. This means, for example, that you can add a rule which creates a To Do item for any email from your boss. Mail—the only other client with support for To Do’s—doesn’t have an equivalent feature. However, it does have smart mailboxes, which let you set up folders with a set of filtering criteria. Instead of moving mail into a folder, though, a smart mailbox just displays matching email, no matter where it’s located, which is useful when searching.

TEST FOUR: HTML Handling

Email can come in HTML form, but do our clients like it?

Despite the complaints of the purists who believe that all email should be standard text, HTML email is a fact of life. Not only do companies send out formatted newsletters using HTML, but some clients even enable users to create HTML emails to send to others. 

Mailsmith takes the purist’s approach and doesn’t display HTML inline at all. Instead, if you receive an HTML email, it converts it to text, but gives you the option to send the HTML to a web browser for display. 

Mailsmith doesn’t handle HTML directly, but you can view such emails in Safari if needed.

All of the other applications attempt to display the HTML with varying degrees of success. PowerMail enables you to turn off HTML email by default, and—like Mail—also offers to automatically download images (although both applications note that this can be a security risk). PowerMail also includes a handy Quick Look feature, so if an email has an attachment, you can see its contents without having to leave the application or open the file. 

THE WINNER: Apple Mail

Of the six clients we tested, three fell by the wayside fairly quickly. Mailsmith’s lack of IMAP support outweighs its plusses. While we appreciated GyazMail’s simple interface, it has little else to recommend it, and PowerMail—despite its excellent filtering—feels like a product in need of a major upgrade.

This leaves us with Mail, Outlook, and Thunderbird. All three are easy to use and have powerful filtering and account support. However, Thunderbird lacks direct support for Exchange servers, while Outlook is the only one that you have to pay for.

That leaves us with one winner: Apple’s Mail. It’s free, it works with virtually every kind of server going, it’s integrated well into OS X, and it has plenty of options for handling accounts, spam, and filters.