Email isn’t optional, but having a bad experience with your email interface is. There’s no need to suffer when so many third-party email clients combine all your email accounts in one place with pleasant experiences and new features. Considering how much time most of us spend staying on top of email, choosing the right email client can save you a lot of time and irritation.
The best email clients are focused on getting you in and out of your inbox as quickly as possible. That can mean the app loads quickly, has customizable keyboard shortcuts, and gives you features like the ability to snooze messages or bundle newsletters to make managing a backlog of messages painless.
Below are the top nine email clients that do the best job of making email more productive and pleasant, based on our testing and analysis. Note that we have reviewed other, buzzy email applications, including Superhuman and Spike, but they didn’t score high enough to make this list.
Recommended by Our Editors
Best for Microsoft 365 Power Users
Why We Picked It
Microsoft Outlook, part of the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, remains the default in many workplaces. That doesn’t mean it can’t also work for your personal email. This application combines your inbox, calendar, contact management, and task list all in one place. Some people find Outlook unwieldy, granted, but others like having so many different tools together. And with clients for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS you can always have access to the same email system.
Who It’s For
Microsoft power users are the best served here. If your email, calendar, and documents are already hosted by a Microsoft account or an Exchange server, Outlook is the best way to take advantage of all those features.
Best for High Volumes of Email
Why We Picked It
Spark is built for one thing and one thing only: email. This application works with every email service, on every major platform. Powering through an email backlog is effortless thanks to offline caching of your messages, completely customizable keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to snooze messages in your inbox for later.
Who It’s For
Spark is ideal for anyone who wants to blaze through emails in as little time as possible. This client is fast, and the customizable keyboard shortcuts make it even faster. Spark also bundles newsletters and marketing emails so you can delete or archive them all at once if you wish. You can also pin emails you want to act on quickly or “set aside” emails you don’t. Even better: Almost all these features are offered in the free version.
Best for AI Email Responses
Why We Picked It
Canary Mail began as an email client built around privacy, and that’s still an emphasis. It supports GPG encryption and can encrypt emails even if you’re not using that standard. But what makes Canary stand out right now is its artificial intelligence (AI) integration, which can summarize email threads or help you draft a message. You can even “write” responses to emails by clicking Yes, No, or Delay and watching ChatGPT draft a response for you (whether this is a good idea or not is up to you).
Who It’s For
Canary Mail is for anyone who wants a clean, familiar desktop email client that packs in modern features, particularly AI. Canary feels familiar immediately after you set it up, and the added features fit in well. If you want to take one step into the future, but don’t want to feel confused while doing it, check out Canary Mail.
Best Google Inbox Replacement
Why We Picked It
Built by a team of former Google employees, Shortwave picks up where the sadly departed Google Inbox left off. Messages that are merely financial updates, newsletters, and social media notifications are grouped in a collapsed bundle, which helps your inbox look tidy and makes it faster to delete such messages all at once. There are a few other thoughtful features, including AI summaries of email threads and familiar keyboard shortcuts if you’re a Gmail user.
Who It’s For
Shortwave is for people who miss Google Inbox, specifically the way it bundled emails into different sections. The way you can customize these bundles is particularly nice. Shortwave only works with Gmail and doesn’t have native desktop clients, but if that works for you, Shortwave is worth checking out.
Best for Making Your Inbox a To-Do List
Why We Picked It
A lot of us already use our inbox as a to-do list; TwoBird makes it official. You can add your Google or Microsoft email accounts to this service and manage them all in one place. But there’s more than just emails in your inbox because you can add notes, which can include checkboxes. The idea is that most of the emails you get are people asking you to do something, so archiving emails is a little like checking something off your to-do list. The notes functionality, then, allows you to put other tasks into your inbox as well, meaning you can manage everything in one place. Calendar appointments also show up in the inbox, and there are features for managing your inbox as well.
Who It’s For
Twobird is best for anyone looking to combine all their productivity tools in one place. Having your email, notes, tasks, and calendar appointments together is powerful, particularly if you’re the sort of person who already lives in their inbox.
Best for Allow-List Inboxes
Why We Picked It
OnMail isn’t just an email client; it’s also a full-blown email service. It has robust support for importing emails from other services, though, and it brings some great ideas to the email space. Maybe the most prominent is that, by default, only messages from people you know end up in your inbox—you must actively decide whether to accept anyone else. Beyond having this allow-list(Opens in a new window) approach, OnMail’s interface is clean and focuses on putting the user in control. Its search is driven by AI, meaning you can use natural language to find what you need. It’s a compelling alternative to Gmail.
Who It’s For
OnMail is for anyone tired of sorting through their emails. Having an allow list really lets you take control of what shows up in your inbox. The only real downside is that you need to switch to a new email address in order to use the service, though it is possible to forward messages from your old accounts.
Best Email Privacy Protection
Why We Picked It
Apple’s default Mail app is easy to overlook, but you shouldn’t. This application supports any email address and has some of the best privacy features on the market. For example, marketers use tracking pixels in emails (single-pixel images) or other embedded images to track when you open their messages and even where you are, physically, when you open them. Some email clients stop the tracking by blocking such images; Apple Mail stops it by caching all images locally before you open them and then opening them via network proxies. Apple Mail is robust in other areas, too: it supports any email address, can snooze messages from your inbox, and even has some built-in automation.
Who It’s For
Apple users who take privacy seriously should use Apple Mail. These are admittedly overlapping categories, but Apple’s commitment to protecting customer privacy is hard to match in the tech industry. Marketers were panicked about Apple’s privacy features when they were first announced, so you know they’re effective.
Best for Simple Windows Email
Why We Picked It
Windows comes with a pretty good email client. It’s called Mail, it supports every major email provider, and it’s snappy. The sidebar has built-in links for Calendar, Contacts, and Microsoft Tasks, other productivity tools that are either free or come with Windows. If you dig into the settings, you also get great color themes, settings for signatures, and other features.
Who It’s For
Windows users looking for a simple way to manage their email should try the Mail app. If you want to quickly combine all your email accounts in one place and don’t need a lot of advanced features, Mail does the job.
Best Open-Source Email Client
Why We Picked It
Open-source applications often make up for what they lack in polish with sheer versatility. That’s true here. Originally created by Mozilla, the nonprofit behind Firefox, Thunderbird is possibly the most customizable email client on the planet. The interface uses tabs, much as browsers do, allowing you to combine your email, calendar, and contacts in one interface. Furthermore, using the hundreds of add-ons(Opens in a new window), you can make this application work however you want, like adding functionality to support chat apps or changing the theme.
Who It’s For
Thunderbird is for anyone who wants to take control of their email situation. The sheer versatility of Thunderbird, not to mention its extensive collection of extensions, means you can make it look and behave however you like.
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