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I'm looking for a good, lightweight email client.

What do you guys recommend?

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2  
We can't tell you what the best client is. If you have some specific features you want, you can tell us that and we can answer for you ("I want an email client that lets me ..."). Otherwise, you can ask for a list of good email clients for Mac and we can make it a Community Wiki. But no one can say which the 'best' is. – Nathan Greenstein♦ Jul 27 '11 at 3:03
Can you give me a list of good email clients – Yeshwanth Venkatesh Jul 27 '11 at 3:11
Ok, I've made it into a Community Wiki on that subject. – Nathan Greenstein♦ Jul 27 '11 at 3:39

3 Answers

up vote 13 down vote accepted

Popular email clients for the Mac include:

  • Apple Mail - my current favourite, especially in Lion.
  • Postbox - Paid for, but feature-rich and quite polished AFAICT
  • Thunderbird Free and open-source. Extremely configurable with a similar extension ecosystem as Firefox.
  • Microsoft Outlook - A very fully featured email and calendar package. It replaces Microsoft's previous Mac email client, Entourage.
  • Sparrow - A unique email application. The layout encourages casual, Twitter-like conversation by evoking the timeline view of popular Twitter apps. It's pretty trendy at time of writing.
  • Mailplane - Basically an optimised, dedicated Gmail browser window. Worth looking into if you're a heavy Gmail webmail user.
  • MailMate - I hadn't heard of this one before, but it has a good review at Lifehacker.
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in the latest sparrow release 1.3 custom IMAP from services like Zimbra seems to be not working. I have a Zimbra account and after successfully configuring it with sparrow , I am not getting any email ? Any explanation as to why this is happening? – Yeshwanth Venkatesh Jul 28 '11 at 15:41
I suggest asking a new question - this is beyond the scope of this question, and not appropriate for community wiki. But, not wanting to be totally unhelpful - it sounds like 1.3 had bugs, and 1.3.1 is the current release – Magnakai Jul 28 '11 at 16:30
Sorry I have asked it as a seperate question and its 1.3.1 and not 1.3 , it seems both the version have this problem. – Yeshwanth Venkatesh Jul 28 '11 at 17:20
up vote 7 down vote

Apple Mail. Nothing is as integrated into the OS as apple's own mail. Works seamlessly with Gmail

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Bar none, Mail.app has been the best email app for the Mac. Comes free with OS X. Enjoy, Piko – Piko Jul 28 '11 at 5:56
4  
Gmail integration is far from seamless. You can't create Gmail filters in Mail. Archiving messages in Mail doesn't do the same thing as archiving them in Gmail. When you're viewing a message in Mail you can't see what other labels it has. – Mike Scott Jul 28 '11 at 7:39
up vote 0 down vote

Try Sparrow, you can try the free version and if you like it, buy it.

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