3rd party mail client recommendations for M365?

A bit over a year ago work migrated from Google Mail to M365. It has been a miserable experience ever since. Managing mail has gone from something hardly thought about to a constant battle to locate information and keep my inbox under control. It just seems to be designed for unsophisticated users and totally neglects the needs of people like those in this community.

The Outlook client on Mac is still missing a range of features. Same on the web client although it’s a different set of trade-offs. I have no problem using a browser client. Gmail was great. Outlook provides very few keyboard shortcuts, they work inconsistently and the whole interface is just a lot of work. I barely needed to touch the mouse to drive Gmail.

Does anyone have any recommendations for 3rd party mail clients that will work with M365. I think IMAP and POP have been disabled by IT which will severely limit options. This feels like an exercise in finding the least worst option rather picking between good alternatives.

I think the following might be in play:

  • Apple Mail - it works but I’m not a fan.
  • Airmail
  • Thunderbird
  • (maybe) Mailmate

Any feedback appreciated. Thanks

Several companies block all third-party mail tools (not just POP3/IMAP) and only allow Outlook.

You might want to check what your company does before researching alternatives?

You’ve got to be kidding me.
My large org went from Office to Google and the entire company threw a fit. Not 1 person in my facility of 1000 actually liked the transition to Google Workspace or Gmail. I was fine with it, but having moved companies back to Office 365, my god what a difference.

I am infinitely more productive on Office 365 vs Google Workspace but that’s on PC, though I can’t imagine it can be that different on Mac.

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This is the right answer. 99% of companies I’ve worked with will never allow 3rd party tools or mail tools.

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I am currently switching from Google Workspace to Office 365. My take is that Office is superior in the amount of different apps for basically everything and the way things can be integrated. The suite apps themselves (Powerpoint, Excel, Wor) are arguably better in Office too and I understand that people used to them will complain when switching.

But Google reigns supreme in realtime sync. I am unpleasantly surprised that when a group of people is working on a big PPT document stored in Sharepoint the Powerpoint desktop app shows persistent hiccups and hangs to the point that the local work cannot be synced to the cloud version. Perhaps this is an issue of the native macOS Powerpoint version, I don’t know how workers across the world would be able to get the job done with this. The web client seems to also struggle with syncing changes done by others in real time although in a less aggravating way.

I use Superhuman for Office365 and it works great. Only downside is the cost (I pay $10 a month as an educator, it is triple that if you’re not in education). I tried Outlook, Apple Mail and Spark and none of them were as good, especially when it comes to saving time and having reliable AI. It will fit with your workflow as it’s 100% keyboard driven and has the best keyboard support in any app I’ve used!

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This is why we stopped using PowerPoint in my team. When working with files online, we lost data and ended up bodging a presentation in front of 60 students because the changes didn’t save. Since then, we have used Google Slides and have had no sync issues at all.

We’ve not had problems with shared Excel and Word files and continue to use those. It seems, at least in my experience, that this only affects PowerPoint.

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Depends what you want to accomplish.

Since you are using M365 I suggest sticking with web-based tools.

Options include:

  • Microsoft PowerFLow
  • Zapier
  • Make.com
  • MIcrosoft’s app store of plug-ins for Outlook on M365

If your goal however is a keyboard-centric experience rather than a mouse-centric experience then perhaps you simply want a “different mail client” which works with your Mac desktop. Why do you want your client to work with M365 if you don’t like using a mouse?

We’re still a small company and I may have enough sway to put a solid case forward for allowing alternate mail clients. The worst possible outcome is that someone says no.

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We’ve mostly had the opposite experience. Sharepoint is a bin fire. No one can find documents any more. The migration project was very badly handled.

The interesting nuance is that most of our work is done with partners outside the organisation. Many of us work more closely with people around the country and other parts of the world that we do with our colleagues. Neither our managed service partner nor a specialist Sharepoint consultancy has been able to design a solution that lets us effectively share documents with external parties without throwing up so many authentication hurdles that external partners just give up. We’re back to emailing copies of documents around.

I’m convinced that it’s called M365 because Microsoft has taken 365 different applications developed by as many different organisation and integrated them into a single inconsistent mess. I’m glad other people have had a positive experience, but the net result for my team has been a large backward step in productivity.

I suggest you have a look at Spark mail client.

I am using Spark Classic (the older version) and it works fine with Microsoft 365 and has good support for keyboard shortcut.

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I’m currently with Google, and planning to move elsewhere. I have a Apple One subscription, and also a M365 home subscription (mind you, this might be something that I move away from over time, not sure I need the productivity tools in the future as the family isn’t using as much these days).

Currently, I’m using both Google and M365 backends (two different accounts for different purposes) as a bit of a test, just to spice things up I’m also using Apple Mail and Spark as my email clients.

Historically I’ve used Spark, as the auto organisation features are really quite good. I also like the overall design (iOS I better than MacOS), including a very satisfying swipe implementation (you can have short and long swipes, and the swipe distance is good, compared to Apple Mail where it often takes too much swiping…if that makes any sense at all).

I’ve tried Airmail (it’s just a bit clunky), Outlook (search is horrible, and the overall design is horrid) and a pile more apps that aren’t likely options for you due to the IMAP/POP block.

A few words about Spark
Spark can support EWS, so if your admin has set this up, might be worth a shot. If you are a SetApp user, it includes a premium subscription that seems to work with Spark giving you access to a few nice features (I also used the free version for years, it’s totally viable and still great experience). The snooze feature is the best in the business. AI stuff is ok I guess. I also like how it groups emails “slightly” in today / this week / last week etc in the left pane, not grouped, but just markers. It also makes the most of screen space overall, especially important on smaller devices.

Where Spark falls down, searching and e-mail composition (especially on mobile). Spark is great for actioning e-mail, keeping your overall inbox managed. However when it comes to finding stuff or trying to create complex emails with attachments, you will find it gets in the way a bit.

A few words about Apple mail
I’m finding myself trying to use Apple Mail more and more, given it is native, fully integrated and appears to be getting more and more love. The reminders integration is great (hey Siri remind me about this email, or use type to Siri) and the overall calendar and tasks from Apple are getting entirely usable. The new AI organisation features promise so much, hoping that with the next beta we’ll see them on iPadOS and MacOS, this could really sway my future direction. I love SmartFolders on MacOS, however can’t understand why these haven’t been added to iOS client. Overall Apple Mail is really well featured, however it takes quite a bit of discovery work to unlock them.

However on the flip side, the limited integrations (no action sheet for messages is just bonkers IMHO), no deeper integration between Mail/Calendars/Reminders is somewhat surprising. The free/busy time look-up works, but is a bit of a challenge, I find myself using web interfaces for meetings.

If you are mainly using email on MacOS devices, I’d go with Apple Mail. If you are more mobile and don’t need to send long heavy e-mail (mainly triage and light responses) I’d suggest giving Spark a go (assuming your admin allow EWS).

For me, I’ll see how the Apple Mail client ends up on MacOS and iPadOS, then make a decision. If I choose Apple Mail, I’d likely move my custom domain into Apple’s email infrastructure. If not, I’ll likely move from Google Mail to M365, mainly to stop Google poking about in my mail.

Good luck!

Yes we’ve seen this too in O365 sync. The key is to NOT have anyone open the desktop app as that royally screws things up. As long as everyone edits via online PPT platform, that will work.

I can’t tell you the productivity increase O365 has given me personally since migrating away from Google Workspace. I’d like to say it’s exponential, but it’s hard to qualify with numbers. OneNote has been a complete game-changer for storing information and the to do list feature merged with Microsoft To Do… OMG!

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I have used the Spark mobile app for a long time for personal email and it’s not bad. I’ve never used the Mac client though.

Someone has done a good job of comparing different email clients here: Definitive MacApp Comparisons - Google Sheets

I’ll need to look in the yellow flag re: privacy for Spark.

My email use case is really only on the Mac. Other than scanning / deleting, any email that needs more than a 2 line reply is done on my Mac. The Outlook iOS client is adequate as a mobile solution for the rare times I actually use it.

Outlook/Exchange is based on a physical filing paradigm where an email can only live in one folder. I work on a lot of different projects so I tend to file any correspondence I need to keep in a project folder. When someone replies, that message ends up back in the inbox. As a consequence, I have to rethink which project the correspondence belongs to every time. First world problems? Sure, but it feels like death by 1000 cuts. If I contrast this to Gmail I could add as many labels as necessary, reply to a message, and press ‘e’ to archive it. It’s out of the inbox but retains the project context without me having to think about it.

The consequence of this approach is it generates a lot of folders. The Outlook web clients provides no way to jump to a folder by searching which also slows me down.

I’m acutely aware of the extra friction this change has added to my process. Despite spending extensive time searching knowledgebase articles, looking through online training, and experimentation, I have not been able to find a solution. Outlook feels like wading neck deep through a swamp while carrying your pack above your head to me.

I think what you’re looking for is “Categories” in Outlook. They work the same as “tags” do in Gmail. You can have multiple ones assigned to a message. And it’s possible to use “advanced search” to go to all the emails tagged with a category, which I think gets you what you’re looking for.

Categories used to only be available on the desktop and web version, but over the summer the mobile versions on iPad and iOS now have them also. They’re a little fiddly to find, but they’re there.

I’ve learned this the hard way. Better stick to the web version, which is better. From what you say it seems that desktop versions perform some kind of locking that messes up the sync. Sadly, I have to work with documents with custom proprietary typefaces and these look fine in the desktop version but look royally messed up in the web version (although “Preview” displays them just fine, go figure!)

I’m already using categories for status information (eg. waiting_for, action_support). I’ll experiment with this as a potential folder replacement approach, but I have doubts about how well this will scale to potentially 100+ categories.

Is there any concept of hierarchy in categories? eg. projects/ProjectA, projects/ProjectB, projects/complete/ProjectZ

Mail mate has seen some recent updates. I was starting to worry it had been abandoned. It’s a very decent app. Unfortunately I’m stuck on windows with outlook. It’s all pretty terrible…

I only have about 20 categories - I imagine they will scale, but don’t have any experience.

As to creating hierarchy, I don’t think they do that at all - at least not natively, though I imagine you name them in such a way that you could.

Note that MailMate is moving to a subscription later this year. Not an expensive one, but still a sub. Details and reasoning behind the change here.