5 Best Email Clients for Mac to Help You Manage Your Inbox

Handling emails might be one of the most important and boring tasks that we do in the entire day. While Mac comes with a built-in Mail app which lets us manage our emails, it is not the best tool for managing emails for everyone. It lacks some advanced features which can help you quickly manage emails and reach your Inbox zero goal. Thankfully, there are a number of third-party email clients on the Mac App Store which can help you deal with your emails in a more efficient manner. Over the last few months, I was trying and testing a lot of them and found these 5 email clients to be the best among them. So, if you want to reach your goal of inbox zero at the end of every day, here are the 5 best email clients for Mac that can help you do that:

Note: I am not using my personal screenshots for privacy reasons. I tried using blurred screenshots, however, I had to blur a big chunk of screenshots which defeated the purpose of adding them. All the screenshots that you see here are taken from respective email client’s website.

Best Email Clients for Mac: What We Looked For?

Before we begin our list, I just wanted to add a quick comment on the features that we looked for when searching for the best email clients for Mac. Email clients are one of the few categories of apps where we felt that the overall design was as important as features itself, and hence it played a big role in our selection criteria. No matter, how powerful an email client is, if it’s not able to present the information in a pleasing and easy to discern way, users will find it hard to use.

Another important feature for a third-party email client is its support for multiple accounts types including Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, Exchange, IMAP, and more. The email client should also be fast at syncing emails. The last thing you want is delayed emails. Apart from these basic features, the email client should bring advanced powerful features such as integration with third-party services, auto-categorization of emails, a customizable interface, and so on.

Based on these basic criteria, we started our search for the best third-party email clients for Mac and here are the best 5 that we found.

List of Email Clients for Mac

• Spark: Best Free Email Client for Mac
• Canary Mail: Best Secure Email Client for Mac
• AirMail 3: Best Task Based Email Client for Mac
• PolyMail: Best Team Focused Email Client for Mac
• PostBox: Best Power User Email Client for Mac

1. Spark: Best Free Email Client for Mac

Spark is one of the most popular email clients for Mac on the App Store and for good reasons. The email client brings an intuitive and pleasing interface which is easy on the eyes and makes triaging email a little less boring. In fact, Spark is my personal email client of choice. I am using Spark since last 18 months or so and I find it quite useful. My favorite thing about Spark is that the devs are really quick to enable new features. For example, when macOS Mojave was launched to the public, Spark was one of the first apps to bring support for the dark mode.

Apart from bringing an intuitive user interface, Spark also brings a number of powerful features which power users will enjoy. The app automatically categorizes your emails in Personal and Newsletters, thus giving you access to important emails at the top. It also has a pinning email feature which I love. The pinned emails always remain at the top and you have easy access to them. Spark also supports short and long swiping gestures which makes it very easy to triage emails.

Other important features include the ability to send emails later, follow up reminders, a built-in calendar, quick replies, smart search, and powerful integration with third-party apps such as Things 3, Trello, Evernote, and more. I also love that Spark has email clients for both iOS and watchOS platforms so you can use the same email client everywhere.

Recently, Spark also released a new paid Team feature which allows team members to chat inside emails, collaborate in real-time on emails, and more. That said, I have only used the personal features of Spark and that is what I am recommending here.

Install: Spark (Free)

2. Canary Mail: Best Secure Email Client for Mac

Canary Mail is one of the most secure and beautiful email clients on Mac and I loved using it during my testing period. Most of us don’t realize this but email, by design, is not the most secure platform to converse with each other, and if security is a big concern for you, you should try Canary Mail. Canary mail solves the privacy problems by bringing end-to-end encryption which ensures that only you and the person you're communicating with can read what is sent, and nobody in between, not even your provider.

The best part about Canary Mail’s encryption is that it can be activated with just one click. If you want even more security, Canary Mail also allows you to use manual keys which a sender can share with a recipient privately. This method is a bit more technical, however, it’s also the most secure.

When it comes to other features, Canary Mail doesn’t disappoint. It brings an arsenal of power user features including focused inbox which gives you access to important emails first, a powerful natural language search, smart filters, bulk cleaner, one-click unsubscribe, support for email templates, snooze, integrations with third-party apps such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Keybase, and more.

Canary Mail also works with all the major email providers including Google, iCloud, Office 365, Yahoo, and IMAP. Finally, it also has an iOS app to go along with its Mac app, thus allowing you to use the same email client on both platforms. If you want a powerful and secure email environment, Canary Mail is your best option.

Install: Canary Mail ($19.99)

3. AirMail 3: Best Task Management Email Client for Mac

AirMail 3 is a powerful email client for Mac which takes a unique approach for solving your inbox zero problems. Instead of treating emails like emails, Airmail allows you to treat them as tasks by using preconfigured identifiers; To-do, Memo, and Done. While the To-do and Done are pretty self-explanatory, the Memo is used for marking emails which you want to deal with later. However, if this approach is not for you, no worries, as you can use AirMail normally as any other email client.

My favorite thing about AirMail 3 is its beautiful design which looks elegant and pleasing to eyes. I also appreciate the VIP feature which allows me to mark certain people as VIPs and quickly access their emails from the side-panel. It is like a smart folder for people and I love it.

AirMail 3 also supports iCloud syncing which makes it easier to sync your account and preferences across all your devices, and believe me you need this feature, as AirMail 3 allows you to configure a lot of things. AirMail 3 also offers one of the best integration suites of productivity apps which include names like Trello, Things, Ulysses, Day One, To Do, and more. Finally, as it is with any other good email client for Mac, AirMail 3 supports all kinds of account including Google, Yahoo, iCloud, IMAP, and more. Overall, I quite enjoyed using AirMail and I can see myself switching to its service in the future.

Install: AirMail 3 ($9.99)

4. PolyMail: Best Team Focused Email Client for Mac

PolyMail is an email client for Mac which is best for teams and small business. The email client brings features that aim to help teams collaborate, be more productive, and work better, together. The big feature of PolyMail is the integration of comments and mentions along with support for email sharing and third-party apps. The comments and mentions feature allow team members to collaborate with each other without needing to send long chains of emails. PolyMail also allows team members to automate repetitive tasks such as sending automated and emails, schedule follow-ups, and more.

PolyMail also allows email senders to get detailed insight into when and how their emails were opened and read. This helps not only in keeping everyone accountable but also ensures that you always have access to all the information that you need to get the job done. Other features of PolyMail include click and download tracking, follow up reminders, analytics report, activity feed, one-click unsubscribe, and more. Just like the others, the app is available on both Mac and iOS platform.

Install: PolyMail (14-day trial, prices start at $10/user/month)

5. PostBox: Best Power User Email Client for Mac

As far as email clients go, the way it is priced, PostBox falls in the premium category. In a world where a competent email client like Spark Mail is free, paying $40 for PostBox might feel a bit much. However, let me just come out and say that PostBox deserves every dollar that it’s asking for. By design, PostBox is not for someone who only has to deal with a couple of important emails daily.

On the contrary, it’s for email power users who require a tool which can help them parse through hundreds of emails on a daily basis. The biggest feature of PostBox is that it’s malleable. What I mean is that users can configure PostBox to fit their workflow exactly as they like it. For achieving this flexibility the PostBox team has integrated tons of feature in the app which power users love.

Let’s start with my favorite feature of PostBox which is the ability to stop emails being sent from a wrong account. Most of us have more than one email account and we keep those accounts logged in our email clients at all time. If you are not careful, sometimes you can send emails from a wrong account which is something I have done more than I would like to admit. PostBox stops that from happening as it identifies your mistake and highlights the contacts in red whenever you are using a wrong email account. This is not a big feature but it’s something that I love and miss when I am not using PostBox.

The main features of PostBox include the ability to customize its interface, sending large files using automatic Dropbox integration, a separate browsing window for attachments which by the way can be easily reused without downloading, real-time filters, organization by people and tags, integration with 50+ third-party apps, pre-canned personalized responses using snippets, advanced searched operations, account groupings, folder creation, and much much more. PostBox is a powerful email client and if you need it and have the capacity to wield it, you should not hesitate before buying this.

Install: PostBox ($40 - lifetime license)

Best Email Clients for Mac: Final Thoughts

If you are not using the right email client, emails can get out of your hands. The best email clients help you get through your emails so that you can spend the rest of your time being productive and creating something that you love. I have tried to include the best email clients for everyone here. Whether you want a free, secure, powerful, or team focused email clients, one of the above 5 email clients will satisfy your needs. If you want to suggest an email client which you find more capable, the comments section is all yours.