Without an easy and effective way for you to communicate with your leads, you’re going to have a very hard time growing your business. This is why, as a lead generation tool, it’s only natural that we examine the 7 best desktop email clients for Mac. The desktop email clients for Mac that we look at in this article make tasks such as organizing email, searching through archives, and staying in touch with friends or professional connections simpler. When you start using an email client that fits your needs best, your daily life becomes much more streamlined and manageable.

I wouldn't vote for it as the best free email client for the same reason as the reviewer says: 'eM Client is certainly one of the better looking clients available for Windows however, the free version is held back by the account restriction to only two email addresses.' For new Mac owners who feel OS X's built-in mail client is too complicated for their needs or who find it doesn't play nicely with their email provider, AppleInsider went hands-on to find the top.

Nurturing Leads With the Right Desktop Mail Client

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Email is arguable one of the most important aspects of a great lead generation engine because it allows you to have personal interactions with potential clients instantaneously, while managing existing relationships efficiently. When you are able to form and manage meaningful relationships with potential (and current) customers your business is going to grow.

Picking the Right Desktop Mac Client

To help you optimize your sales funnel even more (or even just manage your personal email), we’ve organized the 7 best desktop email clients for Mac. We’ve taken screenshots, written descriptions on features, shared pricing information, and done everything possible to make your desktop email client choice insanely easy.

Our goal with this article is to make your picking of a desktop email client effortless. We’re pretty confident that we’ve done just that.

Meet the 7 Best Desktop Email Clients for Mac

These are our favorite desktop email clients for Mac, in no particular order.

1. Inky (get it)

Inky talks about itself as being an alternative to Outlook. It works with Gmail, Outlook, and iCloud email accounts if you opt for a free account. If you want to use your business IMAP email account, you’ll have to pay $5 per month (per account). For a clean looking and reliable desktop email client, that’s not too hefty of a price and well worth it. We like Inky because its powerful search functionality will save you time, its custom inboxes will keep your organized, and it’s dead simple to use.

An added bonus of Inky is that if you have multiple devices, you may also like Inky because it works with Windows and iOS, not just OS X.

2. Mail Pilot (get it)

Mail Pilot is an email client that was designed with an intense focus on productivity. It has a minimalist interface that makes it easy for you to read and organize your email. Mail Pilot is a combination of a to do list and email client, which makes it a potentially perfect tool for managing and nurturing your leads.

Mail Pilot works seamlessly on more than just your Mac desktop– it’s also compatible with iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Pricing for Mail Pilot is $19.99 for the email desktop client and $9.99 for mobile versions.

3. Unibox (get it)

Unibox is a radically different take on email. Instead of grouping by message, your emails are grouped by person. This makes Unibox a potentially great pick for lead nurturing because it means that every person only appears once in the main inbox list, making it easier to keep track of new messages and old conversations.

When you press on a person who has just sent you an email in the program, you’re going to see all of the emails that you’ve ever exchanged with them. Previous conversations will be visible to you so you’ll never forget the context of a message when writing back.

In addition to Unibox being available on Mac, it’s also available for iPhone and iPad. The Mac desktop version costs $15.99 and the iOS version is free (with a pro version available for $4.99).

4. Thunderbird (get it)

Thunderbird is made by Mozilla, the creators of the Firefox browser. If you like email clients like Outlook or the standard Mac Mail app, you’ll probably enjoy Thunderbird. The biggest advantage that Thunderbird has over its competitors is how much more customizable it is than them. You can pick themes and find tools or add-ons that make your email life more enjoyable.

Thunderbird is free to download and also available for Windows and Linux, in addition to OS X.

Best Free Email Client Mac

5. Polymail (get it)

Polymail is a new mail client that is currently in beta. It’s ultra sleek and looks somewhat like Slack, style-wise. With Polymail you’ll be able to easily manage all of your email accounts. It works with Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, or any other IMAP account.

Polymail is currently in private beta. If you get early access to Polymail, it’ll be free to use. Pricing for when Polymail becomes publically available isn’t currently posted anywhere.

6. N1 (get it)

Nylas N1 is a new email client built on Chromium’s code. It is meant to be a simple and powerful way to manage your email. It lets you schedule and translate messages, with dozens of other plugins available for you to use.

N1 works with hundreds of email providers, such as Gmail, iCloud, Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo, and others. It works perfectly with Mac, Windows, and Linux. N1 dubs itself as the email client for everybody, and with its compatibility and customizability, anybody should be able to make N1 fit his or her needs.

Best Free Email Client For Mac 2018 Football

7. Airmail (get it)

Airmail is a fantastically simple email client for Mac OS X and iPhone. It’s great a looking app and makes managing email feel easy (and even kind of fun!). Airmail supports Gmail, Google Apps, iCloud, Exchange, IMAP, POP3, and local accounts. It also allows you to add unlimited email accounts to a unified inbox, powerfully search through archived messages, and much more.

Airmail is $9.99 for OS X and $4.99 for iOS.

Now What?

We’ve shared the 7 best desktop email clients for Mac with you, so now it’s time to decide on which one you like most. Each mail client that we’ve shared makes reading email on your computer more enjoyable, but they all have their own quirks and nuances. Take some time to learn even about that email client that looks best for you and decide if it will help you achieve your goals, whether it be talking to friends, family, or nurturing a newly collected lead.

Suggested next read:

Bonus: Newsletter & Email Tracking

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A free email client can change your life. That might sound ridiculous, but consider how long you spend each week checking your inbox, replying, forwarding and composing. It could easily be several hours, and even more if you use several different email addresses (as many of us do).

Using a dedicated email client not only makes it easier to deal with multiple email accounts, it also means you can take full advantage of extra features such as a calendar, contact management, and neat integration with other desktop software you're using. As with so many other types of software, email clients are not born equal, and it's important that you don't lumber yourself with one that is underpowered, confusing to use, or that offers poor performance.

Take a browse through our best free email client selection and you will undoubtedly see a few familiar names. But you'll also find some that you may not have heard of or tried, so perhaps it's time for you to test drive a new email client!

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1. eM Client

The best email client, with support for a huge range of email providers, integrated chat, smart translation, and simple migration

Best Free Email Client For Mac 2018 Collections

Integrated chat
Only supports two email accounts

eM Client has been around for nearly 10 years now, and throughout that long development it's evolved into the best free email client for Windows.

eM Client makes it easy to migrate your messages from Gmail, Exchange, iCloud and Outlook.com – just enter your email address and the client will adjust the appropriate settings for you. eM Client can also import your contacts and calendar, and it's easy to deselect these options if you'd prefer to manage them separately.

There's an integrated chat app too, with support for common platforms including Jabber and Google Chat, and the search function is far superior to those you'll find in webmail interfaces.

Unlike most free email clients, eM Client is also packed with advanced options like automatic translation, delayed send and encryption. It's a remarkable set of tools, and for managing two email accounts, it's ideal.

If you have more accounts, it's well worth considering upgrading to eM Client Pro for a one-off fee. This lets you connect an unlimited number of accounts, access VIP support (in the unlikely event that you need it), and use the email client commercially.

2. Mailbird Lite

A great-looking client packed that connects all your social apps

Very easy setup

Mailbird Lite isn't just an email app – it's a whole communication platform to which you can add apps for scheduling, chatting, file syncing and teamworking.

Free users miss out on features such as speed reading, email snoozing and quick previews of attachments, but Mailbird Lite is still an excellent choice. The Lite version only lets you connect one email account but, it's optimized for speed, and looks great to boot.

Setup is simple; enter your email details and Mailbird Lite will find the necessary POP or IMAP settings automatically, then get to work importing your messages. It offers to connect with your Facebook account, so it can liven up your inbox with your contacts' profile photos, and can also link with Whatsapp, Google Calendar, free task manager Moo.do, and teamworking app Asana.

3. Hiri

Packed with time-saving tools that'll improve email habits

Smart productivity tools

Hiri is usually a paid-for premium email client, but it's free for TechRadar readers. It's designed primarily with business users in mind (it currently only supports Microsoft email services including Hotmail, Outlook and Exchange), but home users will also appreciate its productivity-boosting features.

If you find yourself spending too long managing, reading and replying to emails, Hiri is the email client for you. It includes a smart dashboard that lets you see how many unread messages you have at a glance and how long you should wait before checking them (after all, how many really need an instant reply?)

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The Compose window is designed to save you time too, offering only the essential options (no fancy formatting) and including the subject line at the bottom so you don't have to write it until you know how to summarise the message.

These little touches make Hiri a truly exceptional client. If Microsoft is your email provider of choice, it should be well up your list.

Best Free Email Client

4. Mozilla Thunderbird

Post Box Express

Plenty of features and extensions – as you'd expect from Mozilla

Expandable via plugins

Thunderbird, from Firefox developer Mozilla, has just undergone a total overhaul that brings it right up to date. Not only does it look smarter, it also works much better. You no longer need to download and configure an extension to make full use of your calendar, and cutting, copying and deleting events is effortless.

You can connect as many email addresses as you like to Thunderbird, and it's totally free, with no ads or prompts to upgrade. It's also very flexible, with a wealth of customizable options – and if you can't see a particular feature, you can expand Thunderbird with third-party extensions.

Thunderbird still takes a little getting used to (there are so many options, the interface is a little confusing at first), but it's a superb email client that'll serve you well – particularly if you have lots of accounts to manage.

5. Spike

Give your inbox the WhatsApp treatment

Best Free Email Client For Mac 2018

Helpful chat-style interface

Spike is a versatile free email client, available for iOS, Android, Windows and Mac, with a handy web app for those occasions when you don't have time to spend installing software.

It's billed as the first 'conversational' email app, which essentially means it presents messages and replies in bubbles in real time, in a style that looks very much like WhatsApp. This works particularly well for the type of short emails that you're likely to send to friends and family, making it refreshingly simple to keep track of long email chains that would usually be a mess of nested messages.

Spike is free for personal use, with support for an unlimited number of email accounts and up to 10 'group chat rooms'. If you're sick of trawling through messy lists of replies, it's a breath of fresh air.

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