I use separate clients. For personal I’m fully in the Apple ecosystem, I even have a custom domain. I use Apple Mail to take advantage of this. I use Superhuman for work simply because I save a lot of time with it’s keyboard controls and AI.
I find this separation nice because when I’m on holiday I can turn off work - I can check it periodically, but anything personal I can see without being disturbed.
I also want the extra automations for work, soon Superhuman will reply to emails for me for routine things like booking a meeting (by sending a Calendly link), even while I’m at the beach on holiday! I can’t see Apple Mail doing that anytime soon.
I use two different email accounts, one for personal, one for work (my own business).
I don’t add multiple accounts to each email client I use. So when I am in the client used for personal, I only see those emails, and when in the business email client, I only see business email.
For me, this has been the only foolproof way to avoid sending business email to personal or vice-versa. Even being fully “present” and careful, when i mixed accounts and switched context/focus, it did happen once in a while.
On a related note, I have moved off Apple Mail client and stopped using Outlook client a year or so ago.
Along with that, due to storage and other desires, I no longer run any client email and do everything cloud based. I use FastMail web interface with my business email account (fastmail based server), and I used Gmail web client for my personal email (gmail based).
The different UI of these web interfaces also helps with context switching between personal and email tasks.
EDIT: On iOS (iphone and ipads) I do use Apple native email app, but my email usage on those devices is 99% read-only so I’m ok with having both accounts feeding into one “client” app on iOS.
I’ve considered this approach previously but ended up giving up and keeping all accounts in Mail.app anyways.
Isolation for personal and professional emails is made via Focus Modes.
The thing I would miss the most are the links to specific messages, which I use in conjunction with my to-do manager and my notes app. I get Gmail can make links to specific messages, but it only works on desktop browsers IIRC.
Using Mail I can create those links with any of my devices and they work pretty reliably.
In my case, I’m at almost 25gb of local storage on Mail… that’s a lot of mail, but I’m not squeezed for storage on my device anyways…
That is my preference as well. I see you have one personal iCloud.com account. One Google work account, and two personal Gmail accounts.
I currently have one paid Google Workspace account that accepts mail for both of my personal domains, one personal Gmail account, and one Apple account. On my Mac all my mail accounts run in Google Chrome and I use Safari for everything else.
The way this works is my GW account runs in one profile, and my gmail account runs in a second profile. And my Apple mail (which is used to receive mail only) forwards to my GW account and is then deleted from Mail.app.
Using Google in the browser gives you several options. You could use each Google account in a separate profile and deal with each one separately. Or perhaps combine the contents of your two personal gmail accounts into one and forward one account into the other.
My first step if I was doing this again would be to determine how I wanted my email organized, and where I wanted my master list of contacts. You can subscribe to all of your email accounts in Mac Contacts then drag individual contacts from one account to the other as needed. (Note this copies the contact, it does not move it)
I’m sure this sounds complicated, but I have one rule that forwards my Gmail to my Google Workspace account, and two rules in my GW account that sorts and files (labels) all incoming mail and puts only the most important messages into my Inbox (about 95% of the time ).
I’m sure several of us here could help you as well as whoever manages your Google work account.
Correction: I have three rules. The third one takes every message containing the word “unsubscribe” and files (labels) it under Review.
I do the same. It keeps things simpler for me, and Apple Mail plays nicely with other Apple apps in a way that third-party apps don’t.
For example, I can just drag a Mail message into Reminders, and the Reminder will have a deep link to the message. That lets me get it out of my inbox, while still giving me quick access to the information I need.
If your email work account is in Google, this is not reflected in iCloud storage used by Mail. It is stored in Google. So what you see here is the space occupied by your personal email account, which I understand is an iCloud account.
Google Accounts connected to Apple Mail just mean that Mail.app will download the mails to your computer and use Google to send the emails, they do not store those mails on iCloud. Keep in mind, also, that Mail is conservative when it comes to download all the mails from a massive account. I have never managed to download my 50k+ email messages from Google using Apple Mail to my computer.
If you “disconnect” your Google email account from Apple Mail, the messages will still be kept in your Google account (so they would be accessible via web, of course) but I’m not sure what happens to the locally downloaded messages, I suppose they would be purged eventually fro your device.
While Gmail in the web is superb, the mobile companion app is very limited, specially for assigning labels to mails. While I’m not a heavy email user on-the-go, my most usual task is archiving emails so I’ve setup rules in Gmail so that most incoming messages are assigned some label. Then I can simply archive the mails with a swipe in the Gmail mobile app.
And finally, apart from the web interface, the best native email app for Gmail in macOS is Mimestream.
My personal email is in Gmail so I have a pinned Gmail tab in my personal Safari profile. Did the same for my work account but the organization is migrating to Microsoft, so I’m using the Outlook “native” Mac app more and more these days, which I prefer to Mail.
I assume that this means you get email notifications unless you selectively turn them off based on focus mode, correct? I ask because I have all email notifications turned off, so I’m not sure this approach would affect me.
That is very helpful and much appreciated. I would probably keep my iCloud email in Mail, but I am considering removing all Gmail accounts from Mail and only using Google on the web or the Gmail app. I’m going to experiment for a month to see if two clients work for me or merely adds additional friction.
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Well, AI autocorrect hits again!