Here at WorkHacks, we use as our primary email service, and although Gmail is great in so many ways, having your email as a tab in your browser is less than efficient (and often downright inefficient). We are always on the lookout for native desktop applications to manage our Gmail inbox. Here are 3 Gmail desktop apps we’ve used and think you should give a try.

I’m advising a great new Mac desktop app for Gmail. Check out my recent post where I show you a or go right to their and get yourself the app. Mailplane is the Mac desktop app that we use everyday to manage our Gmail inbox.

We like it because it mimics all the features that you get on Gmail in the browser while providing a desktop app to manage your gmail separately from the (always cluttered) browser experience. You get access to all your Gmail settings such as labels, keyboard shortcuts, custom inbox views and google chat, as well as with services like,. Although it is not free (you can try it with a 30-day free trial), the Mailplane team is constantly working to make it better, releasing new features and updates. In Mailplane’s they added support of full screen mode (for Lion), the Gmail Labs ‘preview pane’ feature, Evernote integration and Google ads hiding.

We’ve been using it for a few years and believe it’s well worth the $24.95 investment. Sparrow is a and that takes a streamlined and minimalistic approach to managing your Gmail. It has a much different interface than what you will experience when using Gmail in your browser (or Mailplane), but that is the point. Your inbox resembles more of a traditional email client inbox, with your inbox selectable on the left and a reading pane on the right. It does support a lot of Gmail features like search, labels, starred items, priority inbox, one-key shortcuts and Send & Archive. Sparrow also offers a few like syncing via Facebook Connect to pull in your contacts’ picture, integration with DropBox and CloudApp and a convenient “Quick Response” reply box. There is also a, which we did not yet give a try. You can get Sparrow for free (ad supported) or for $9.99.

Favorite Feature: The most useful feature of the Sparrow app is the “Quick Response” option, allowing you to respond to a single email or email thread in a simple text box. If you want all the bells and whistles like rich text edit, Send & Archive, insert attachments, etc., you can simply click on the expand icon to open those features. (Screenshot demo below) We were able to get our hands on a beta invite to the new Fluent app and gave it a test drive (you can see a demo account ). Right now it is only available as a web-based app, however we assume (and hope!) they have aspirations to create a desktop client in the future. It is quite similar in look and feel to Sparrow but provides a few including Gmail To-Do list support, more visible label integration, attachments in one place and enhanced conversation threading. Fluent is in its early beta stage, but still managed to impress with its clean design and user-friendly features. We expect great things from Fluent as they build out their product. Favorite Feature: The most pleasing feature is Fluent’s enhanced conversation threading, allowing you to click on an email thread and quickly preview all the emails within that thread in a very minimalistic fashion.

It is quick and easy to preview the entire thread, dropdown and reply to an individual conversation or “reply all” to the entire thread. (Screenshot demo below) Conclusion We gave Sparrow and Fluent a try, and although we are full believers in a more streamlined work flow and minimalistic approach to managing email, it is going to be hard to convert us from Mailplane.

This is mostly due to the lack of integration with some of our favorite Gmail plugins (of which we have many) such as,. With that said, Sparrow and Fluent are showing us that managing your email on Mac does not have to be limited to Apple Mail, or clones of Gmail like Mailplane.

There is much room for innovation in this space. We will be watching it closely and reporting back to you. Other Reviews of these Apps Macworld AppStorm Macworld The Verge Cult of Mac Lifehacker.

Good article, and congratulations on your first post! One thing though – from your screenshot I can’t see how Mailplane is any less cluttered than Gmail’s web interface. Even without the instructional overlays, it might be a little more cluttered than mine. I tried Sparrow and didn’t find enough benefit to it to warrant switching from the web interface. Very much looking forward to seeing what Fluent has to offer. Sometimes these apps win not by being a full-on replacement for the web interface you may use for most of your email experience, but in the way they perform specialized functions you may occasionally require, or in the way they lend focus to a specific activity.

We don't come to bury Apple Mail —but we do come to praise its alternatives. While the free email app that comes on every Mac is grossly under appreciated, there are features it lacks. There are people it doesn't suit, either, and that can be both because of how it looks and the way it works. There are alternatives, however, and that is excellent. If you listen to any developer of any of these rival offerings though, they will say the same things. Obviously they'll hype up their differences or improvements over Apple Mail and clearly they'll also at least gently rubbish that macOS staple. They'd never get you to even look at their apps if they didn't do both of these.

One more thing they tend to try, though, is to make you think that you should jump ship completely. Each one is claimed to be a total replacement for Apple Mail and they certainly can be. Install intel wifi driver. They just don't have to. You can and we're going to end up recommending that you use two email apps. One of them is Apple Mail. What the other is depends on how you use email, how much you get of it and just a little bit on how your brain happens to work. Just as we aren't going to analyse your head, we're also not going to catalog every possible email app available.

What we can do, though, is pick out types of email that suits types of people. Just one thing We're talking here specifically about the Apple Mail app or what's called an email client. We're also talking specifically about the Mac version as iOS is a very different subject. What we're not talking about, though is the email service that you use. Apple Mail is also a service: is the system by which you get your @icloud.com address and by which you send and receive emails. There are many email services with the main ones being Apple's iCloud, Microsoft Exchange or Google Mail.

The Apple Mail app will work with just about any email service provider you can find. So here we're focusing on what that app can do and what it can't —or what is done better by alternatives. We're focusing on who these rival apps are best for. The minimalist emailer Really if you just get a few emails a day then apart from envying you, we also recommend that you stick with Apple Mail. That's especially true if you then don't tend to do much with those emails: if you just have to read them and not particularly act on them.

You could use any of the email apps we mention and a dozen more to do this but you wouldn't see any advantage. You might, too, see disadvantages as some of the more powerful apps are complex and unnecessarily so for basic use. Bombarded with emails If you get 30 emails an hour, you're not going to be able to stay on top of them. Even if your full-time job was manning an email support service, you'd struggle so you need to look at email triage. By default, Apple Mail will show you the sender's name, the subject and in theory the first few words of the message. In practice, senders can now change that preview to instead show you any text they like. Consequently email newsletters promoting an event might choose to put its venue and date in there.

Anything that means you can look at a message once and immediately see whether you have to do anything about it is a great thing. Apple Mail also lets you specify that you only want to be interrupted by certain people. It lets you say that you want to hear a bleep when your boss or your client emails but otherwise you get left alone until you're ready to dive into your inbox.

You do that by marking an individual as a VIP. That's an excellent system for how swiftly you can do it. The sender's name in any email you get is a dropdown menu and that contains the option to Add to VIPs. However, it's no use at all unless you know the specific email address of this most important person. Maybe they use several different ones and you'll have to separately mark each one as a VIP. Or more likely, you need to react quickly to emails that come from anyone working at that client. Apple Mail's VIP system can't help you there: you have to start looking into Mail rules.

The Mac version of Apple Mail has you can give it for how to deal with various messages but there is a problem. You have to leave Apple Mail running all the time and on a Mac that is switched on all the time. Whereas is replete with powerful options for rules —or what it instead calls filters —and they run before mail even reaches your Mac. That sounds ideal and it is something we wish Apple would add to its email app but it too comes with a problem. To get this kind of functionality you have to switch email services: instead of using Apple's iCloud Mail, you have to get a Google Gmail account. Just to make this as complicated as possible, you can use the Apple Mail app to read and write emails with your Gmail account.

However, Apple Mail isn't great at it and there is no official Gmail app for Mac. If you'd be happy just using Gmail online in your browser, though, its filters or rules are tempting.

Download Google Mail App For Mac

There is a and that too needs you to move over to using a different email service. This time it's Microsoft Exchange and that sorts emails before you get them. It tends to make a guess as to what emails matter to you and which don't, so it's automatically sorting the important ones into a priority inbox within Outlook. It's hard to give up control over your inbox and let an app make decisions on what you want to read, but Outlook is good and gets better the more you use it. Gmail is and Outlook is provided as part of.

Getting things done The busier you are, the more it's likely that you need to actually do things based on the email messages you get. You have to take action that's a bit more involved than just replying. This is where Apple Mail hurts us the most. We've got Macs running all day so we can have rules set up to deal with things but what we can't easily do is act on messages.

It would be great, for instance, if you got a message that you could just pop straight into your To Do list with a click or a swipe. Apple Mail can't do that but by assuming you're initially more interested in who's emailed you than what they've said. No question, if your partner emails and so does a supplier you used a year ago then one of these is going to be urgent and the other probably isn't. So Unibox displays a list the senders. You have to click on them to see even what the subject heading is.

The result is that the app is slightly more minimalist than Apple Mail and it does appear to be right about our interest. At least, it turns out that a huge number of emails we get we know we can ignore just because the sender is a newsletter whose list we've never been able to get off.

Unibox also has a button for quickly emailing a person. Only, it appears when you've had an email from them. You'd have to be pretty organized to choose to write them a new email instead of just clicking Reply but perhaps you are. Unibox and is also. The way you think Most email apps are aimed at particular types of people. Airmail 3 is for ones who are working and need to actively do things with their email, for instance., though. It's very definitely for technical people.

It presents nearly everything in a barebones, stripped-back look that somehow seems minimal even though it is packed with features and buttons. This is the email app for you if you're ever fussed about seeing the behind-the-scenes source code for an email. It's for seeing as many emails at once as possible. It's just not as user-friendly as others: it isn't as thought-through. For instance, if you start to forward a message to someone and then change your mind, there isn't a Cancel button.

There's only a Delete one and you have to realise that it deletes your unsent email, not the original. Or because it's meant for more technical people, you do get the odd moment when you're left wondering 'yes, and?'

At some dialog box. The spell check one, for instance, can be set to pop up when you hit Send but unless you've got a dictionary installed, it just sits there waiting for you to figure out how to dismiss it. It's not so bad if you do have a dictionary installed but first you have to realise that you need one and then you have to get it.

Sometimes when we would go to install a dictionary we'd just get an error. Speaking of errors Another reason for leaving Apple Mail is that it goes wrong. You will sometimes find messages you archived off popping back into your inbox. Occasionally you'll get error messages that are sufficiently cryptic that you just say OK and carry on.

That's especially so when you get the message but Apple Mail appears to have done what you wanted. It's frustrating and it's distracting but unfortunately it's also typical of all email apps. There is no one email app we know of that is rock-solid reliable all the time. There is no one email app that is powerful enough to be used by everybody.

Although, if there were one such app, it would be Apple Mail. Apple Mail add-ons There are companies that don't make alternatives to Apple Mail, they make add-ons or plug-ins that can be used with it. So Sanebox, for instance, is a service that gives Apple Mail the ability to snooze messages.

It's also able to automatically generate reminders for you to chase if someone hasn't replied in a month. That's a subscription service which claims to work with all email apps and all email services. Then there's Mail Act-On which adds keyboard shortcuts for handling your mail faster. It gives you rules for sending mails, too, such as delaying delivery or automatically adding CC recipients. These are both additions that can make Apple Mail itself better.