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A recent surge of worthy new email clients offers Mac users some of the best choices they’ve ever had for managing their mail. With a panoply of clever features and new ideas, these contenders.
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Email is, in many ways, the hub of modern life. Finding the best email app for your needs is key to a having a more manageable and productive digital experience, whether you're communicating with friends or restoring forgotten passwords. With Google's recent announcement that it will pull the plug on Inbox by Gmail in March 2019, and both Newton and Astro meeting their makers even sooner, you may be in the market for a replacement.

The best email apps help you manage the most important aspects of your digital life without making them more complicated. Some let you turn your inbox into a to-do list. Others are deeply customizable, giving you greater control. What makes the best email apps different from one another, and which one is right for you?

What Makes a Great Email App?

For this list of the best email apps, we only considered email clients, leaving out email services and email assistant apps. An email client is a piece of software you install on your computer or mobile device to access email, even if that email is hosted by another service. An example is the Mail app that comes pre-installed on iOS devices. By way of the Mail app, you can access a Gmail account and a Yahoo Mail account. Gmail and Yahoo Mail in this case would be email services, which we did not consider for this list of the best email apps. Client apps almost always let you access multiple email accounts, giving you the option to see all your messages in one consolidate view.

We also homed in on email apps for personal use, which nixed from consideration a few apps that tend to be more prominent in the business world, such as Microsoft Outlook (desktop app) and IBM Notes. They both have their place among email aficionados but tend to be more well suited for organizations than individuals.

As mentioned, we did not consider email assistant apps, or services that work within your existing email to make it better in some targeted way. An example is SaneBox, a service that works inside your existing email service to automatically sorts incoming messages (among other things). Another example is Boomerang, which adds new features and tools to Gmail and Outlook that help improve your writing and help you remember when to follow-up on messages. Both these apps are highly capable, but they aren't clients and so they weren't considered for this list.

There can be some confusion about email clients and services, however, because some apps cover both ground. Gmail, for instance, is not just an email service but also has a mobile email client app by the same name. The Gmail mobile app lets you read and reply to messages from not only your Gmail account, but also your Yahoo Mail address, Microsoft Office 365 account, and others.

In addition to being email clients, the apps in this list meet other criteria, such as being in a state of full release. In other words, no beta products allowed. (Don't worry. We have an eye on some of the more interesting email apps in the works, such as Pigeon and Superhuman. But we can't accurately assess them until they're fully released.) Ease of use played a major role in our decision-making, as did stability. We also looked for apps that had at least one standout feature or reason for choosing it, which is listed in the 'best for' line in each app's description below. Finally, if you're in search of an app with a specific feature in mind, see the comparison table at the end of this article.

When it comes to email apps, there's no reason you can't choose several to use for different purposes. You might have one app you adore installed on your personal computer, something else for work email, and yet another on your phone. Which ones you choose will depend on how you like to interact with your email and what you do with it. Whatever the case, the best email apps have you covered.

The 15 Best Email Apps

Airmail (iOS, macOS)
Edison Mail (Android, iOS)
eM Client (Windows)
Front (Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, web)
Gmail for Mobile (Android, iOS)
Mail and Calendar by Microsoft (Windows)
Mail by Apple (iOS, macOS)
Mailbird (Windows)
MailMate (macOS)
Outlook Mobile (Android, iOS)
Polymail (iOS, macOS, web)
Postbox (macOS, Windows)
Spark (iOS, macOS)
Spike (Android, iOS)
Thunderbird (Linux, macOS, Windows)

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Airmail (iOS, macOS)

Best email app for customizing your inbox

Airmail started out as a simple email app, but over time, it grew with features, and today it's one of the most powerful email client apps available. Customizable notifications make sure you only get alerts when you receive emails from your most important contacts. Swipe gestures are also customizable. Airmail can help you write faster, with built-in templates for your most-used responses. And, it works with your favorite productivity apps, including Fantastical, Evernote, OmniFocus, Dropbox, and others.

Price: $4.99, $9.99

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Edison Mail (Android, iOS)

Best email app for categorizing messages automatically

Edison Mail is a mobile email client app designed to give you assistance with sorting and organizing your email. It can automatically sort incoming messages into appropriate groups, such as messages that contain tracking numbers for shipping, those pertaining to subscriptions, and receipts. An undo-send button gives the app universal appeal, and option to turn off read receipts make Edison even more valuable to people to like to be in control of their email. Don't confuse this app with the Edison Assistant (formerly called EasilyDo or Smart Assistant by EasilyDo), as the latter is does more to help you organize your life beyond email alone.

Price: free

eM Client (Windows)

Best email app for merging email, calendar, contacts, tasks

If you're looking for a powerhouse of an email app for Windows, eM Client is a great option. It not only combines email, calendar, contacts, and tasks in one place, but also supports touch interfaces. While the price for a Pro account may sound a little steep, eM Client offers some functionality that's rarely found in other email apps, such as language translation. That's reason enough to choose eM Client if you frequently send and receive messages in multiple languages and aren't fluent in all of them.

Price: free; $49.95 for Pro

Front

Best email app for team collaboration

Front app lets teams manage a single inbox collaboratively. With Front, you connect shared inboxes, such as catchall addresses like contact@company.com, and then anyone with access can answer or assign messages for other people on the team to answer. Front also lets you connect social media accounts, which teams may also tend to collaboratively.

Price: from $15/month per person, minimum 2 people

Gmail Mobile (Android, iOS)

Best email app for searching and organizing messages

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While Gmail is the gold standard among webmail services, its mobile app is surprisingly light on features. But that's not the deciding factor on whether to choose the Gmail app for your phone. The real selling point of this app is how fast and capable it is at searching even the most bloated inboxes. When you use it with a Gmail account (or two; it supports multiple Gmail addresses), you get the same great options for automatically sorting mail into tabs that the service creates for you: Primary, Social, and Updates. With limitless ways to sort mail with filters and labels and exceptional spam filtering, Gmail makes it a breeze to see your most important messages quickly.

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