The Ultimate Collection Of MacOSX Email Clients

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Since I moved to MacOSX back in 2006, I’ve been always looking for the best solution to manage what is currently the center of my daily job: emails. I’m a power email user and managing emails in a very effective way is crucial for me.

While there are some very good alternatives for Windows that I became familiar with, the world of email clients for Mac was completely unknown to me. I firstly started to stick with Thunderbird which was the app I used on my Win laptop and, of course, the easiest choice. Then I started trying other alternatives in order to find the solution which could have been the best for the way I use to work.

All that said, the following is a comprehensive list of email clients for MacOSX I tried out together with my personal (I repeat, personal) view on which is better and why.

1. Mail App

Mail, the default client included in MacOSX, is certainly the most used among Mac users. Light and easy to use, it supports multiple accounts (both POP and IMAP), RSS, NNTP (i.e. newsgroups). Many useful plugins are available too, so you can easily add new features by just downloading and installing them.

Pro: It provides the best integration with MacOSX (i.e. AddressBook and iCal) I found so far. Calendar events are automatically added to iCal and you can easily add new contacts to your address book from a mail signature.

Cons: I noticed that using it with POP3 accounts and a very big inbox make the app very slow and unresponsive sometimes.

2. Entourage

AKA the Outlook for Mac, it’s included in the package of Microsoft Office. I found it easy to use and very fast even if I still prefer Mail for a number of reasons, first of all the integration with the OS. Unfortunately it offers an integrated calendar and address book, separated from those included with MacOSX. You can sync them, but one way only.

Pro: In a business environment, deep integration with MS Exchange. Nice interface, too.

Cons: Not really a MacOSX thing. Moreover, I found annoying the fact you cannot use complex HTML signatures!. Not Free.

3. Thunderbird

Version 2.0 is officially the latest version available, but I would recommend to try v3.0 beta out. Very fast, very well designed interface and you can basically do everything. The integration with the OS is quite good and, unlike v2.0, it also supports the integration with Address Book (read only mode, though). I found it a bit heavy and it seems it consumes a lot of RAM.

Pro: nice and easy to use interface, supports NNTP

Cons: large footprint, not completely integrated with MacOSX yet (despite v3.0 is way better than 2.0)

4. Postbox

Postbox has just been announced a couple of days ago and it’s getting a lot of buzz. It’s based on Mozilla (developed by former Mozilla employees) and it adds a couple of  unique features that make it something definitely worth a try. This doesn’t mean it will be sticky, but those features certainly make it stand out of the crowd.

In a nutshell, Postbox focuses on your emails’ content, cataloging every single piece of content, images, attachments, links etc. and making them easily searchable and shareable across main social networks and re-use them easily. You can also assign topics to your email in order to easily find them in the future or mark messages as “To-do” and they will be displayed on top of your message list.

Pro: lots of features and some Gmail-like approaches brought to a desktop email.

Cons: still a young product and flagged messages (through IMAP) are shown as to-do (doesn’t make sense…); lots of people asking for Quicklook integration

5. Correo

Firefox stands to Camino like Thunderbird stands to Correo. Correo is a very simple and lightweight open source email client based on Mozilla, Camino and Thunderbird. It provides a good integration with MacOSX but it’s still a very basic application not really suitable for a heavy email usage.

Pro: good integration with MacOSX AddressBook

Cons: still very buggy, very basic functions. Doesn’t support IMAP authentication, that is no Gmail support

6. GyazMail

It’s a nice email client but it’s the only one where I don’t really find anything special. And it’s not free, too.

Pro: it works and it’s a native and very lightweight MacOSX (Cocoa) application well integrated with the rest of the OS

Cons: not free, nothing really unique

7. Outspring Mail

Outspring Mail is a native MacOSX application, very well integrated  with iCal and Address Book, which claims to offer the ability to analyze your behavior while working with emails and “is able to ascertain patterns in the way you reply to and file your mail and make suggestions to assist you with your communications”.

Pro: MacOSX integration, very fast

Cons: this is the reason why it has not been sticky for me: it doesn’t keep the attributes like flags or colored labels. Moreover, it’s very expensive – $59 is too much for what it offers

8. Kiwi

Actually, this client doesn’t exist yet but it seems to be very promising. Kiwi Client is aimed to become a revolutionary MacOSX email client focused on IMAP, scalability, OS integration and high performance. Definitely a project to monitor.

Pro: should be lightweight and very fast

Cons: not available yet

Now the question everyone is asking to himself: what’s better? Not easy to say and it mainly depends on what your needs are. My three favorite ones? 1) Mail – 2) Thunderbird 3 – 3) Postbox. Postbox could easily become #1 if only would solve some issues that are preventing me from using it continuously, like a better management of flags and the integration with Quicklook.

What about you? What email client do you use? Please leave your comments here, I really appreciate your thoughts.

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Tagged as: correo, E-mail client, entourage, kiwi client, luca filigheddu, Mac OS X, mail.app, outspring mail, postbox, Thunderbird