10/1/2019 The Best Mail Reader For Mac
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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 have also mounted a serious challenge to the relatively stagnant Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook. But with so may options to choose from, it’s now even harder to pick out the best email client for your particular needs. We’ve found one strong program that offers a great mix of features, usability, and value for a broad swath of users, plus several more that will cater well to more specialized preferences.
Top choice: Postbox 3
Postbox 3 () isn’t the newest or sleekest candidate in this roundup. Its design hews more closely to the traditional Mac look and feel, rather than adopting a slick iOS-like appearance. But for $10, it combines reliable performance, smart design, and a wide array of impressive features that make the program feel like what Apple Mail ought to be.
Even though it’s built on Mozilla’s aging Thunderbird underpinnings, Postbox handled my email quickly and confidently. Setting up new POP and IMAP accounts went smoothly; in one case, when I tried to set up a work Outlook account, Postbox patiently guessed at several different IMAP configurations until it found the right one. It then filled up my new mailbox relatively quickly, despite the pile of messages involved, and let me track its progress with a clear but unobtrusive progress icon.
Everywhere you turn in Postbox, you’ll find well-thought-out features that enhance your email experience. Message threads are easy to follow, with each message’s beginning and end clearly marked, and a quick reply box waiting at the end of the most recent message.
An inspector pane next to each message shows you not only who sent it —and, with a click, their entire contact card from your address book—but breaks out any links, images, maps, or package delivery info it finds in the message. You can also easily search for any messages, images, or attachments from a particular sender just by clicking links within their address book info.
And if work requires you to send a lot of form responses, Postbox builds in that ability. Just compose your response in preferences, then choose it from a pulldown menu when you’re writing a new email.
Postbox plays nicely with many popular social and productivity tools. If you have Evernote installed, Postbox can send emails to that service to help you keep track of them. Once you set up your account information, dragging and dropping files from your Dropbox will create links that let recipients download those files straight from your Dropbox account. And you can tie in your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to not only get links to your contacts on those services, but post to all three directly from Postbox. The program will even use the Gravatar service to pull in images for your friends and acquaintances from one or more of those services.
A helpful To-Do mode lets you create new tasks, or turn existing messages into tasks, then check them off as you finish. Postbox also integrates an RSS reader to keep track of your favorite feeds, an increasingly rare feature among modern email clients. And Postbox provides great support for Gmail, including the ability to use Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts. None of these features gets in the way of simply sending or receiving email, but they’re all readily available when you need them.
Finding and using all these features can get a bit intimidating when you first start using it, but Postbox’s clear, straightforward, and easily searchable online help files make the learning curve much gentler.
Postbox 3 has begun to show its age; OS X updates since its initial release have actually broken a few features, such as integration with the Mac’s Calendar. But overall, Postbox seems like the best mix of price, capabilities, and quality for the majority of Mac users.
Top contendersInky
If you use email more for pleasure than business, you’ll likely enjoy Inky’s earnest efforts to present your inbox in ways that matter to you.
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Built for portability, Inky () stores information for your POP and IMAP accounts—but not your mail itself—securely on its remote servers. Once you’ve set up that info, a single Inky login will bring all your email to any computer you’re using Inky with.
In a clean, colorful interface, Inky lets you view mail as a unified inbox, by individual accounts, or by several different clever Smart Views. The program’s smart enough to automatically recognize and sort messages containing maps, package info, daily deals, subscription mailings, and other common categories. Mac os rss reader.
By clicking icons on each message, you can also teach Inky how to rank your email by relevance, so that it’ll display messages that matter to you more prominently.
I occasionally had trouble logging in to Inky, and had to quit and restart the program a few times to get to my mail. And Inky doesn’t offer business-friendly features like to-do lists, or any bells and whistles beyond sorting and handling email. But it’s free, it’s fun to use, and it’s full of well-executed and practical new ideas.
Mail Pilot
The same can be said for Mail Pilot (; Mac App Store link), a $20 email client built loosely around the Getting Things Done approach to productivity. It looks terrific, but for all its good qualities, it’s still missing a few crucial features.
Mail Pilot treats your inbox as a to-do list. Each message is a task that you can check off right away, set aside until you’ve got the time for it, or ask to be reminded about on a certain date. Clearly labeled keyboard shortcuts at the bottom of the screen make these tasks easy to accomplish.
It’s IMAP-only, and setting up your account ranges from simple (Gmail) to tricky (Outlook, although the program’s great help files spelled out exactly what I needed.) Once your mail’s in place, Mail Pilot offers lots of different options to navigate message threads. The variety puzzled me at first, but I came to appreciate the different ways it sorted and stacked my messages.
As a fairly new program, Mail Pilot’s still somewhat under construction. The ability to save new messages as drafts or search by message text won’t arrive until a later version. But if you’re in synch with Mail Pilot’s productivity-first approach, you’ll nonetheless find the program helpful and worthwhile.
Unibox
Give it a few more versions, and Unibox (; Mac App Store link) could become quite the contender. Right now, it’s a very well-designed and usable $10 app with a few pesky hiccups.
Setting up IMAP accounts is fast and easy, and once your mailboxes are populated, Unibox displays them not by message title, but by who sent you mail on a given day. From the top of the screen, you can switch between viewing each sender’s message thread, or seeing all the attachments or images in that thread by list or by icon.
I really enjoyed Unibox’s sleek and efficient one-window interface, which makes maximum use of space while still displaying your mail clearly. The new message window slides down from the top of each message thread. Buttons to sort, junk, or delete a message materialize when your mouse hovers to the left of it; replying and forwarding options appear when you hover to the right.
I wasn’t as fond of the blank screen Unibox displayed upon loading until I manually refreshed my mail. And it has a bad habit of truncating longer messages by default, forcing you to click again to read the whole thing. Still, it’s a smart program full of good ideas; it just needs a bit more polish.
The rest of the packAirMail
AirMail () offers an attractive, inexpensive front end for your IMAP-based webmail of choice. But while the program’s interface is nice to look at, it’s not always easy to use, with tiny, hard-to-see buttons and space-hogging new message windows. Gmail messages also take an unusually long time to load; promised Dropbox support proved impossible to set up; and AirMail offers few help features.
Mail.app
I used to love Apple Mail () but it’s begun to stagnate with the last few versions of OS X (Mail is free with OS X Mavericks). The latest incarnation trickles in a few new features, including the welcome ability to search by attachments and attachment types. And, as befits an Apple program, it’s well-integrated with the rest of OS X. It’s also the only client in this review to natively support Microsoft Exchange accounts, although Outlook’s increasing support for IMAP renders that a bit moot.
Alas, the latest version was plagued by troubles with Gmail, and Apple has released updates that address many of the problems. But wouldn't it be nice if it simply just worked?
MailMate
Like a mighty rhinoceros, the $30 MailMate () won’t win any beauty contests; it’s not what you’d call “approachable”; and it’s astonishingly powerful. Its gray, austere, text-only interface conceals jaw-dropping abilities to search, sort, and sift massive piles of mail. Its support for SpamSieve and PGP, and its unbelievably granular search categories—like “level of server domain”—make MailMate the undisputed best email pick for power users, but probably a needlessly intimidating choice for everyday users.
See a list of email clients available for the Mac Bottom line
Even if you only want a simple, no-frills email experience, you don’t have to stick with Apple Mail. Inky’s a great free alternative for folks who just want a streamlined inbox presented in a friendly way. On the other end of the spectrum, MailMate is ideal for tech-savvy experienced users who want to rule their inbox like a cruel, all-powerful god. And right at the happy medium between those extremes, Postbox offers plenty of easy-to-use enhancements for a fair price.
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Comic books as a medium seem tailor-made for tablets, even if the timeline doesn’t precisely add up. But there are a surprising amount of comic reading applications meant for old-fashioned desktop machines, too. This stuff comes in handy for gadgets that blur the lines, like the Microsoft Surface, or for someone who’s amassed a large collection of DRM-free comic book files.
MComix: Windows, Linux
If you’re looking for a simple, easy-to-use comic reader with enough features to give you some extra bells and whistles, MComix should probably be your first stop. It’s free and open source, based on the older and now abandoned Comix reader project, regularly updated for Windows and Linux. If it had a macOS version, we might just be able to end this article right here.
The interface has a basic library function, but it’s easier to simply open your files (CBR, CBZ, and PDF, among more pedestrian image formats) directly from your computer’s file explorer. The reading view makes it easy to find your page with thumbnails along the left side, and various fit modes along with a full screen view are handy in both button and hotkey flavors. The reader supports double-page views to best emulate comic reading, and a right-to-left mode for those who prefer manga to western-style comics.
The download comes as a standalone package, so you don’t even need to install anything, though you might want to associate some of the more common comic file types with MComix soon after trying it out.
YACReader: Windows, macOS, Linux
If you live a multi-OS lifestyle and you prefer some cross-platform consistency, YACReader is probably your best bet. It supports all of the common file types and archives, with a focus on building up an extensive and well-organized library of personal comics. The application will automatically fetch tags and issue data from the ComicVine database, and those who are keen on sharing with friends can install the UI-free server version to remotely host comics on iOS.
The application is available on Windows in both installer and portable flavors, plus 64-bit macOS and various Linux distro versions. The interface itself is a bit minimal for my taste, but it quickly disappears if you’re reading in full screen anyway. Sadly, though YACReader plays nice with all three major desktop platforms and can remotely serve files to iOS, there’s no Android client as of yet.
Comicrack: Windows
Though ComicRack comes in Android and iOS flavors, it’s Windows-only on the desktop. Which is weird, because it’s one of the more technical and analytical options out there. The tabbed interface supports reading multiple books at once, and its double-pane main view focuses on the user’s library or standard file browsing more than some of the other programs on this list. But for the comic enthusiast who’s serious about managing a large collection, this could be the best option.
Once you dig into ComicRack, you see it’s a little more forgiving than it appears at first glance, with a double- and triple-column option and a handy all-in-one page view. Double-tapping the F button will switch from standard fullscreen view to a minimalist windowed look—good for reading while you keep an eye on something else on your computer. It also functions as the most feature-rich viewer when used as a pure file manager.
SimpleComic: macOS
SimpleComic uses the fluid, and integrated user interface that was popular with mid-aughts OS X design to create what’s probably the simplest comic reader around. Though it supports all the common archive formats and includes the usual bells and whistles like double-page display and right-to-left reading, it does so with a minimal interface that will make you nostalgic for a Steve Jobs software demo. It’s probably the simplest and best-looking item on this list (with no particular care for libraries or tagging), so it’s a pity that the developer has only released a macOS version.
MangaMeeya: Windows
While you can certainly use MangaMeeya for western comics, it’s designed specifically for Japanese-style manga. This focus extends to more than just the right-to-left default page layout: the image display includes various tools that make black-and-white scans more visible and legible on computer screens, something that isn’t typically a concern for full color graphic novels. That specialization does seem to be a bit of a detriment for those looking for wider image file support or library tools, though—you’ll have to keep your files organized manually in Windows Explorer. On that note, it’s only available for Windows, more’s the pity.
Comic CBR, CBZ Viewer: ChromeThe Best Reader For Windows
The Chrome Web Store isn’t exactly littered with dedicated comic viewers, but this seems to be the best among a very short field of contenders. The minimal interface can load up CBR or CBZ archive files wither from your personal Google Drive account or on your local machine. The super-simple interface offers one- or two-page views with standard or right-to-left reading, with the fullscreen option controlled by the browser itself. Like many Chrome extensions, this one is supported by advertising, and there’s no way to pay to get rid of the web-based ads. The extension will work on Chrome OS devices and more standard desktops, but with the options laid out above, there’s really no reason to use it on anything but a Chromebook.
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