The Best Email Clients for 2025

Apple’s default Mail app is easy to overlook, but you shouldn’t. It supports any email address and has some of the best privacy features available. Marketers use tracking pixels in emails (single-pixel images) or other embedded images to track when you open their messages and even where you are. Some email clients stop the tracking by blocking such images; Apple Mail stops it by caching all images locally and then opening them via network proxies. Apple Mail works well with other macOS and iOS features. Otherwise, it can snooze messages from your inbox and even has some built-in automation features.

Apple Mail is a good choice if you want your email client to interact smoothly with other Apple products like Calendar, Contacts, and Siri. It offers extra privacy, too, with the Mail Privacy Protection feature that helps prevent senders from knowing when you open an email and your IP address.

Canary Mail began as an email client built around privacy, and that's still an emphasis. It was also ahead of Gmail and Outlook with artificial intelligence (AI). Like those email services, it can summarize email threads or help you draft a message. You can have AI write responses to emails by clicking Yes, No, or Delay, and then watch ChatGPT draft a response for you. These features require a Growth plan ($3 per user per month). Upgrading to a $10-per-month Pro+ subscription gets you PGP encryption, among other features.

Canary Mail is for anyone who wants a clean, familiar email client with modern features. Its AI and encryption features require paid subscriptions, but the basic app is free and available for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. Canary immediately feels familiar after setting it up, and its extras fit in well. If you want to take one step into the future without being overwhelmed, try Canary Mail.

Microsoft Outlook, available as part of Microsoft 365 or from the Microsoft Store as a free standalone app, works well for both work and personal use. It combines your inbox, calendar, contact list, and task list all in one place. The client has a simpler interface than in the past, but you can switch back to the Classic version for now if you get it through a Microsoft 365 plan and need any of its exclusive features. One of the best features available in both versions is the ability to separate your mail into Focused and Other inboxes, which works even for Gmail and Yahoo accounts. Apps are available for all mainstream platforms.

Outlook is a great choice if you use the Microsoft 365 productivity suite, Outlook.com email, or Windows. It's also available for free on Android, iOS, and macOS, and features such as its Focused Inbox and integrated calendar give it an advantage over alternatives.

Coming from Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, Thunderbird is possibly the most customizable email application on the planet. The interface uses tabs, much as browsers do, allowing you to combine multiple email accounts, calendars, and contacts into one interface. Furthermore, using the hundreds of available add-ons, you can do everything from adding support chat apps to changing the client's theme.

Download Thunderbird if you want to control your email. It works with all major email services and is completely free. Thunderbird's sheer versatility, not to mention its extensive collection of extensions, means you can make it look and behave however you like. It's the only app here that runs on linux. Otherwise, it's available for Android, macOS, and Windows but not iOS (yet).

Built by a team of former Google employees, Shortwave picks up where the sadly departed Google Inbox app left off. It groups messages that are merely financial updates, newsletters, and social media notifications into bundles, which makes it faster to delete them all at once and helps your inbox look tidy. Among the other thoughtful features are AI summaries of email threads and familiar keyboard shortcuts for Gmail users.

Try Shortwave if you miss Google Inbox, specifically how it sorted emails into different sections. The way you can customize these bundles is particularly nice. Just keep in mind that Shortwave works only with Gmail addresses. Free users get limited AI features but must deal with a "Sent with Shortwave" note in their email signature. The paid Personal account ($7 per month with an annual commitment) removes this signature and adds more extensive AI and organization capabilities. Apps are available for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.

Spark concerns itself only with email, saving you from the distraction of calendars, chat, and so on. It works with most email services and offers apps for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. Powering through an email backlog is effortless thanks to the ability to snooze messages in your inbox for later, completely customizable keyboard shortcuts, and offline caching of your messages. You need a paid subscription to get its latest AI-powered features for prioritizing and composing emails, along with other features that businesses would want (such as collaboration tools). You can try these features with a 7-day trial.

Spark is ideal if you want to blaze through emails in as little time as possible. This client is fast, and customizable keyboard shortcuts make it even faster. Spark bundles newsletters and marketing emails so that you can delete or archive them all at once. You can also pin emails you want to act on quickly or "set aside" emails you don't. Many of its useful features don't require a paid subscription.

Many of us already use our inbox as a to-do list; Twobird makes it official. You can add your Google or Microsoft email accounts to this service and manage them all in one place. But you can also add notes, which can include checkboxes. The idea is that most of the emails you get are people asking you to do something, so archiving emails is a little like checking something off your to-do list. The notes functionality, then, allows you to put other tasks into your inbox as well, meaning you can manage everything in one place. Calendar appointments also show up in your inbox.

Twobird is worth a look if you want to combine all your productivity tools in one place. Having your email, notes, tasks, and calendar appointments together is powerful, particularly if you’re the sort of person who already lives in their inbox. Twobird is currently free, but the company plans to add paid tiers for advanced and business users. It runs on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.