For new Mac owners who feel OS X's built-in mail client is too complicated for their needs or who find it doesn't play nicely with their email provider, AppleInsider went hands-on to find the top alternatives. Email clients have a long history as utilitarian bits of software; the category is not a particularly. Email clients have a long history as utilitarian bits of software; the category is not a particularly alluring one, and as a result it has traditionally seen relatively little innovation. That has begun to change as email proves more difficult to replace than some believed, and the focus has shifted toward adapting the decades-old technology for the future. For this roundup, AppleInsider spent five days with each client, using them as our exclusive gateway to email on our desktop during that time. Each one was asked to handle three accounts— one personal Google Apps account, one AppleInsider Gmail account, and one cPanel-based IMAP account with 20,000 test messages in its inbox. Unibox Best overall. From German developers eightloops, is a speedy IMAP-only client with a slick and well-thought-out user interface that is perhaps the most Apple-like we've seen. After feeding Unibox the name, email address, and password associated with each account, our mail server settings were automatically detected and the accounts configured without any further intervention on our part, though it does offer the option to set server parameters manually. Importing messages went smoothly, with Unibox showing no sign of stress even with more than 35,000 emails in our combined inboxes. By default, Unibox shows users a split-pane view with contacts on the left and their associated messages on the right. There is no master list of conversations here— messages are organized by contact, a departure from the traditional email paradigm but one that we grew to enjoy after an admittedly rocky acclimation period. Unibox's slick interface and contact-centric design make it the best client we tried. The contact list is reshuffled based on the date of your last communication with that person, beginning with the most recent. Clicking on a contact displays your entire conversation history in chronological order, and individual messages can be moved, replied to, or deleted from the thread with controls that are hidden until you begin to move your mouse pointer in their direction, a feature that helps keep the user interface uncluttered. Attachments are shown alongside the message that they came with, but Unibox also provides a separate view that collects and displays all attachments exchanged with that contact. We found this, combined with OS X's QuickLook, to be an extremely useful feature that we would like to see other clients adopt. There are some features we missed during our review— for instance, we occasionally wished for something akin to Apple's Smart Folders, and we would like a more robust method for dealing with conversations with more than one recipient. Overall, however, we found Unibox to be a breath of fresh air and a mail client that we can heartily recommend. Unibox is for $9.99 on the Mac App Store. Mailplane Best for Gmail power users. For those who live and die with Gmail's web interface but want a more deeply integrated OS X experience than a web browser can provide, Mailplane is far and away the best option. Configuring accounts is painless, and Mailplane handles Google's two-factor authentication easily without requiring users to create an application-specific password. Mailplane's ability to simultaneously access any number of Gmail accounts at once is a godsend for those— like most AppleInsider editors— who use Google's email service for both personal and professional reasons.
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March 2019
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