‎The official Gmail app brings the best of Gmail to your iPhone or iPad with real-time notifications, multiple account support and search that works across all your mail. With the Gmail app, you can:. Undo Send, to prevent embarrassing mistakes. Switch between multiple accounts. Get notified of n. Outlook is an email manager introduced by Microsoft and is a part of the Office Suite tools.

Apple and Microsoft go toe-to-toe on several fronts like Word processing apps. However, Apple aims to offer a solid email experience with the Mail app on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. That's why you can't help but look at a viable alternative from Microsoft's camp - Outlook for Mac.

Recently, Microsoft revealed the brand-new look for Outlook for Mac, which is available through the Fast Insider group. That coupled with a bunch of other software integration in the Outlook for Mac app makes it a viable rival to the Apple Mail app.

Apple Design Award Email. Airmail 3 — This fully accessible mail client was designed specifically for iOS, macOS and watchOS. Email workflow is optimized with extensive customizations, custom actions and deep integration with a wide range of apps and services.

In this post, we shall compare Outlook Mail for Mac to the default Apple Mail app. The comparison will be based on UI, Email Organization, Compose Mail, features, and apps integration. Let’s get started.

Cross-Platform Availability

I know cross-platform availability doesn’t matter much in an Email app. But I’m mentioning here so that you can expect a seamless experience on every platform. Apple Mail is only available on iOS, macOS, and iPadOS.

On the other hand, Microsoft Outlook is accessible on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Web.

Download Microsoft Outlook for Mac

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User Interface and Customization

Microsoft's plans to redesign the interface of Outlook for Mac is much needed to keep it in line with other platforms. There's a catch when it comes to trying out the new Outlook for Mac. You'll have to install it along with other Office apps through an ISO installer.

When you open Outlook for Mac, you'll notice the Compose (New Message) button and Search bar at the top. On the left sidebar, you'll find your email accounts and other folders. It is impressive how Microsoft uses a column layout style and adds the calendar integration to the extreme right. You won’t have a hard time navigating the new look.

You can change the default fonts for new mail, reply mail from the Outlook settings.

Apple Mail looks quite vanilla compared to the Outlook. The default interface shows the Email as well as folders on the left sidebar, messages list in the center, and mail view on the right. Interestingly, Apple Mail offers several customization options.

Go to Mail > Preferences > Fonts & Colors. From there, you can change the message list font, message font, and even fixed-width font. Apple Mail also allows you to change the list view preview from the default 2 lines to 3 lines or more.

Compose Mail

Apple Mail offers a bunch of editing options when you compose a mail. While writing a mail, you can change the font type, size, color, play with bold, italic options, and even add a bullet or number list.

I like how the Mail app lets you add the picture or scanned documents directly from the connected iPhone.

Outlook’s compose menu toolbar is richer than Apple Mail. It lets you highlight the words. You can even add tables and signature. Guess what? Outlook for Mac also supports templates. Yes, you can create ready-to-use templates with images and text. You can save them for later use. While composing an email, just tap on the three-dot menu above and select view templates and add a relevant one in the mail.

Such templates can be when you are composing emails related to specific subjects like marketing surveys, inquiries, and so on. Just create a master template with necessary text for each type or topic of emails you use often.

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Additional Features

If you like flagging emails, the Apple Mail offers a couple of options for neater organization. For instance, you can assign an orange flag for Bank mails and green flag to all finance mails. Most mail apps only support the normal flag (Red color) option.

From the flagged mail section, you can quickly jump to the exact mail that you are looking for. Apple Mail also supports Rules. You can select Mail > Preferences > Rules and create personalized email rules for you. I have created a rule to archive all the emails that come with Coronavirus in the subject.

We can only hope that Apple integrates services such as Reminders, Calendar, and Notes in the Mail app. It would be easy to set reminders for an email or create an event for the Mail app meeting.

Outlook for Mac app also supports to Rules options. I would highly recommend you to set some of the effective rules to organize emails like a pro. The app comes with Calendar, Sticky Notes, and Microsoft To-Do integration.

It works like a charm. If you are using Outlook as your mail provider and if you flag an email in it, the mail automatically gets saved into the Flagged mail section in the Microsoft To-Do app.

Email Export and Third-Party Integration

Best Email App For Mac 2020

Apple allows you to export any mail as a PDF file menu. Open any mail and go to File > Export as PDF, and it will create a PDF file from the selected mail. Unfortunately, the app doesn’t offer any third-party app integration.

Microsoft offers a dedicated third-party app store. You can tap on the three-dot menu and go to Get add-ins from a dedicated store in Outlook.

For example, I use OneNote and Trello extensions in Outlook to directly send the selected mail to the OneNote or Trello.

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Use Mail Like a Pro on Mac

The comparison above gives you a clear view of the Apple Mail and Outlook’s strength and weaknesses. Apple Mail wins with the simple UI, mail organization, and iPhone integration. However, several folks complain that it is sluggish and buggy. Also, it doesn't translate to a pleasant performance on iOS either. Outlook for Mac brings a breath of fresh air with Microsoft apps integration, richer compose menu, and third-party add-ins. Hopefully, the Outlook for iOS also gets a facelift soon. As of now, I’m sticking with Microsoft’s offering. What about you? Sound off in the comments section below.

Next up:Recently got a new Mac? Read the post below find the best Mac apps to stay organized.

The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.Read Next7 Best Mac Apps to Stay OrganizedAlso See#macos #email

Did You Know

Email existed even before the world wide web.

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It’s a no-brainer to use Gmail in a Web browser window on a desktop computer, such as your Mac. That’s how Google intends it to be used.

But many Gmail users prefer to use a desktop email app, such as Apple’s stock Mail app. This is a reasonable approach, but an imperfect one, due to an architectural disconnect between Gmail’s labels and the limitations of the IMAP standard used by email clients. Joe Kissell devotes an entire chapter of Take Control of Apple Mail to getting Gmail and Apple Mail working together, yet incompatibilities persist.

A new desktop email app aims to sweep away such issues. Mimestream, created by former Apple engineer Neil Jhaveri, is a Swift app designed from the ground up for Gmail. Just log in and go, with no futzing to get email working properly, and with familiar Gmail features functioning as expected. Jhaveri worked on Apple Mail (among other projects) during his tenure at Apple from 2010 to 2017.

Mimestream is very much a work in progress, and Jhaveri has a long list of Gmail capabilities that aren’t yet supported. But the app is far enough along to pique our interest, and we wanted to tell you about it. Needless to say, you shouldn’t consider this article a formal review of the app.

Though Mimestream will eventually be a paid app, it’s free to use while it’s in beta.

Mimestream works only in macOS 10.15 Catalina or later because, according to Jhaveri, it leverages APIs and capabilities (like SwiftUI) available only in the latest versions of macOS. “Mimestream intends to showcase the best that the Mac has to offer, and new versions will generally require the latest version of macOS,” Jhaveri says.

Google Email App For Mac

How Mimestream Is Similar

Superficially, Mimestream doesn’t look all that different from other native Mac email programs.

You could almost mistake it for Apple Mail, given its three vertical panes, with a left-hand sidebar for navigating among your Gmail accounts and their various message repositories and identifiers, a middle column that shows message lists, and a right-hand pane where individual messages appear.

As a native Mac app, Mimestream has features you’d expect, such as message caching, offline support, macOS notifications, keyboard shortcuts, and toolbar customizations.

Jhaveri said Mimestream users can expect decent performance for several reasons, including the fact that the app is multithreaded to perform background sync in parallel with users’ actions as it taps multiple cores on a Mac.

How Mimestream Is Different

How Mimestream differs from Apple Mail starts with IMAP—short for Internet Message Access Protocol—which is how desktop email programs commonly sync messages with a mail server. That’s how Apple Mail accesses Gmail. It does so dependably, but imperfectly and eccentrically.

As Joe Kissell notes in his book:

Gmail’s implementation of IMAP is highly nonstandard. No matter how you slice it, the experience of using Gmail in Mail won’t be exactly like using a conventional IMAP server, nor will it reflect what you might expect if you’re used to using Gmail in a Web browser. It’s a weird and potentially frustrating hybrid of the two, and while some people don’t mind it at all, others find it so annoying that they stop using either Mail or Gmail.

To be fair, Google bolted IMAP support onto Gmail as a courtesy for those who wanted to use desktop email clients; at its heart, Gmail simply doesn’t think of mail in the same way as IMAP.

Mimestream mostly bypasses IMAP, harnessing Google’s Gmail API instead to replicate Gmail’s web features on the Mac desktop more faithfully. As a result, a number of Gmail capabilities have already migrated gracefully to Mimestream:

• Labels: One of Gmail’s marquee features, labels are tags you apply to messages so you can more easily find them later. One message can have multiple labels. Apple Mail has trouble with this because it wants to treat labels as mailboxes, which aren’t the same thing (a message can exist in only one mailbox at a time). Mimestream supports labels natively.
• Aliases: By this, I mean Gmail’s option to authorize addresses from other accounts as valid From addresses when sending mail. Getting this to work in Apple Mail requires a bit of tinkering—Joe Kissell’s book tells you how—but it is automatic and seamless in Mimestream.
• Search: Standard Gmail search queries are supported, with the added benefit of offline searching through cached messages.
• Signatures: To my surprise, the signatures I’d painstakingly assembled in my various Gmail accounts appeared in Mimestream exactly as they do in the Gmail Web app (but you can’t edit them in Mimestream). In Apple Mail, Gmail signatures don’t show up and have to be replicated.
• Inbox categories: This more recent Gmail feature optionally partitions the inbox into four classifications called Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums. You have the flexibility to do this in Mimestream, even if you don’t have it set up this way in the Gmail Web app.

Because Mimestream largely bypasses IMAP, it solves an issue that bedevils some who use Gmail at work or school with organizational accounts. Network administrators can turn off IMAP, which restricts mail users to the Gmail Web app even if they might prefer to use a desktop app. That’s the case where I work, yet Mimestream downloads my email just fine.

Email App For Mac

But there’s a wrinkle. Because Mimestream does harness IMAP for push email, that feature is absent in the app in accounts that have IMAP disabled on the back end. As a result, I have to fetch my work messages manually at intervals.

This end-run around IMAP blocking for message downloading may not be available forever. As Jhaveri explains:

The fact that the Gmail API remains open, even with IMAP off, is probably an oversight on Google’s end, and I would not be surprised if it is plugged at some point in the future. It was certainly never an advantage that I planned for or even anticipated.

With that in mind, Jhaveri said he is looking for ways to make push work directly with the Gmail API and not require an IMAP connection.

Where Mimestream Is Going

As noted, Mimestream is not yet a full substitute for the Gmail Web app because it still lacks many important features. Some of these are on Jhaveri’s roadmap for upcoming versions, but others are not supported by the Gmail API and are therefore unlikely to make an appearance anytime soon. I am not listing every absent feature here, but you can find a full accounting on the Mimestream FAQs page.

Features on track for inclusion in upcoming versions of Mimestream include:

• Filtering by Unread: This is a must-have feature for some. TidBITS publisher Adam Engst said he couldn’t use Mimestream in its current form because “it has no way of showing just unread messages in a label, which is key for me.”
• Priority Inbox: Though Inbox Categories are supported, Mimestream cannot yet handle the similar Priority Inbox feature that automatically sorts messages into three sections: important and unread, starred, and everything else.
• Move To menu command: Right now, you have to drag messages onto labels, which isn’t always the easiest approach.
• Undo Send: You know how you always think of something to add to a message as soon as you click Send? Undo Send gives you a short window to abort delivery of a just-queued message.
• Editing of server-side filters: As it stands, you can manage filters only within the Gmail Web app, and it would be nice to create and modify filters without logging in to Gmail.
• An unsubscribe shortcut: Promotional email often includes unsubscribe headers that email apps can use to create an interface that makes unsubscribing easy.
• Editing of vacation auto-responses: Again, this task currently requires you to log in to Gmail, but that shouldn’t be necessary.

Gmail features unsupported by the Gmail API and therefore unlikely to show up in Mimestream in the foreseeable future include:

• Message snoozing: It’s easy in Gmail’s Web app to hide a message with a snoozing command that brings it back on a chosen day and time. Mimestream-only snoozing is under consideration.

• Scheduled sending: Sometimes you want to schedule a queued message to be sent at a specific future time.

• Conversation muting: Occasionally, a conversation will blow up and overwhelm you with notifications.

It’s important to note other areas where Mimestream and Gmail’s Web app are rapidly and drastically diverging. For instance, Google recently integrated other services such as Meet video conferencing and Chat messaging into its Gmail Web app. It had earlier done the same with Calendar, Tasks, and its Keep notes. Such integrations are not on Mimestream’s short-term roadmap.

Is Mimestream For You?

Outlook Email App For Mac

You can probably easily answer this for yourself since, among Gmail fans, Mimestream is liable to elicit one of two visceral reactions, either “Holy cow, I can’t wait for this puppy to be finished” or “Meh.”

Despite being intrigued by Mimestream, I must confess to fitting into the latter camp—I find that the Gmail Web app has become attractive, flexible, and powerful over its 14-year lifespan.

But if you prefer the desktop app approach, alternatives to Mimestream do exist. Some of these can barely be called apps; they’re just wrappers that embed Gmail’s Web interface into a standalone Mac window but otherwise add little to the experience.

Other apps are more ambitious and combine Gmail’s Web interface with Mac features for a hybrid experience. One example is Mailplane, which both Adam and I have used for a long time (see “Mailplane Goes Chrome and Adds Features,” 17 August 2018).

Email App For Mac And Ios

There’s also Kiwi, another hybrid Gmail app that is good for those who make heavy use of other Google Web apps, such as Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. Each of these appears in standalone windows for enhanced productivity, so Kiwi is a fine choice for those who are all in with Google services and want to multitask comfortably in a Web environment.

Best Gmail App For Mac

Since Mailplane and Kiwi use Gmail’s Web interface as their starting point, the aforementioned Google integrations—including Chat, Meet, Tasks, and Keep—also work fine.

But Mimestream might carve out a niche for itself as a Gmail-friendly desktop app that is fully operational offline—perfect for business travelers and others who might deal with iffy Internet connections that hamper the use of Gmail’s Web app.

It’s early days with Mimestream, and much too soon to render a definitive judgment, but we’ll eagerly monitor its progress.