What is the best Mac OS desktop mail client?

February 27th, 2013

I realized today, as I have five different email addresses in five+ different email tabs (1 personal, 1 company, 1 for spam, 1 for a company I advise, etc.), that it may be time to adopt a more consolidated view.

I have tried Mail, and in fact I keep my accounts integrated there just in case. But I've never been a big Mail fan. Gmail support (i.e. archive, labels, etc.) was an afterthought for Mail, making it not the best mail client for Gmail.

I have tried Sparrow. Sparrow wasn't bad, but ultimately I switched back to the web version.

I am excited for Mailbox for iOS, but they don't have a desktop version. And I haven't used it enough to even say whether or not it's a solution.

I know a lot of you deal with hundreds of emails a day from multiple accounts. What have you found to be the best mail client?

George Song UX Designer and Web App Developer

February 28th, 2013

Mail.app + MailActOn <http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html> = winning combo.

David Matousek Director, Mobile Development Manager at John Hancock Financial Services

March 4th, 2013

I have found that Mail has worked the best for me...I have tried Thunderbird and Sparrow. I feel that I have had very few syncing issues among my work computer, home computer, iphone, and ipad.

Karan Gupta Co-Founder and CEO at Mammoth

February 27th, 2013

I have multiple GMail accounts. After trying it and giving up several times, I now exclusively use Mail.

Essentially I stopped replicating GMail behaviors in Mail, which does the trick for me. I don't care about labels and archiving anymore, which I used to consider must-haves. I can get everything done with flags, rules and search. Mail is not perfect, but its super-fast.

Armando Carrasco Software Architect and Developer

February 27th, 2013

I recommend Thunderbird, one of the best mail clients for Mac:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

Ryan Berryman Founder, CEO at Oakmore Labs

March 4th, 2013

I agree with George -- I use Mail + MailActOn + MailTags (also by indev.ca)

Joanan Hernandez CEO & Founder at Mollejuo

March 5th, 2013

Hello,

Mail is a very good program. However in my case (like many of you) I have several e-mail accounts from several domains. Under those circumstances I consider a local mail client more efficient. Personally I prefer and use Microsoft Outlook, which comes bundled with Office.

Before any of you guys jump to say you have to pay for it, since my company is a member of the Microsoft BizSpark program, I get Office (and many more Microsoft perks) for free.

Cheers,

Joanan

Mike Preuss Growing Visible & helping other early stage co's

February 27th, 2013

Have you tried using Fluidapp? Specifically making a Fluidapp from Gmail?

James Bond CTO at SupplyBetter

February 27th, 2013

What are your main reasons for preferring a native desktop email client, vs. web-based? And are there specific things you don't like about GMail? Not that I'm a fanboy -- it actually took me a while to get used to it. But at this point, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, for me.

Ryan Jackson Founder at Paid

February 27th, 2013

Great question. I actually am quite accustomed to the web-interface, but the problem is I have five tabs open for five separate accounts. That alone makes it ridiculously hard to reach "inbox 0" simply because I can't see everything at once.

Jesse Silver Online Marketing & User Acquisition Expert

March 4th, 2013

I'm a big proponent of Sparrow, especially if you use Gmail and/or Google Apps to power your mail server. I actually started with Sparrow using their iOS app, which I couldn't get into (the UI is excellent, but I couldn't get past the latency issues with using a 3rd party mail app on the iPhone) and quickly went back to using Mail. However, in using the mobile app, I discovered their desktop solution and haven't looked back since.

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