Best Desktop Apps Outlook Mail Mac Has To

Best Desktop Apps Outlook Mail Mac Has To

On opening a PST, Outlook on Mac has to convert it first, and its painful if its a large PST.

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.

Importing messages went smoothly, with Unibox showing no sign of stress even with more than 35,000 emails in our combined inboxes.

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.

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.

We found this, combined with OS Xs QuickLook, to be an extremely useful feature that we would like to see other clients adopt.

Overall, however, we found Unibox to be a breath of fresh air and a mail client that we can heartily recommend.

Mailplanes ability to simultaneously access any number of Gmail accounts at once is a godsend for those like most AppleInsider editors who use Googles email service for both personal and professional reasons.

Below that are tabbed browser windows for each account switching between accounts is trivial, unlike Googles wonky web implementation.

Drag-and-drop and QuickLook are both available for dealing with attachments, and like Mail.app, Mailplane will handily offer to resize attached images when composing a new message.

In addition, Mailplane offers Notification Center integration for new mail and a menubar widget that shows the most recent mail for each account and allows users to temporarily silence notifications with a Do not Disturb mode, which we found useful when looking for periods of uninterrupted concentration.

After signing in to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Dropbox, Postbox will pull photos for contacts, provide one-click access to their social profiles, and display metadata like employment information from LinkedIn in the apps Inspector pane.

We found Postboxs Dropbox integration particularly useful when sharing large attachments, as we could simply embed links to the files in Dropbox.

Where Apple Mail recognizes strings like dates and tracking numbers within messages, Postbox identifies and collates them in the sidebar along with links, images, attachments, and the aforementioned social data.

Enabling the Inspector does consume valuable horizontal screen space, but a keyboard shortcut is provided to quickly show and hide it.

Quick reply is a lifesaver when working through large batches of emails at, for instance, the end of a long international flight.

We also found Postboxs tabbed interface for mailboxes and messages difficult to use, and sometimes opened new tabs unintentionally.

In our testing, it was much slower than its competition and the user interface is in desperate need of an overhaul.

Other than its extensive add-on ecosystem, there is little reason for most users to choose Thunderbird over Apple Mail.

Though we havent had a chance to test Outlook 2011 ourselves, corporate IT administrators who support Macs on their networks confirmed that Outlook remained the preferred choice when asked.

MailMate features expansive keyboard shortcut support and a bevy of customization options, though its spartan user interface is often difficult to navigate.

It handled our large mailboxes with aplomb, and its granular search functionality is second to none.

Best Desktop Apps For Mac Outlook Mail