Apple ships the Mac with several built-in apps that are surprisingly feature-rich and fast. But over time, I found myself replacing a handful of them with third-party alternatives that simply did more.
I didn’t make these switches overnight. Each replacement solved a specific problem or added a feature I couldn’t live without. These are the Mac apps and tools I use instead of Apple’s stock apps.
With automatic mail categorization in Apple Mail, you can organize your emails and keep your personal inbox less cluttered. It’ll intelligently put all your newsletters, receipts and promotions into separate folders.
If you struggle keeping up with your inbox, this feature is a great way to make your email easier to understand at a glance.
Keep reading below or watch our quick video.
As a Mac user, Apple Mail seems like the obvious email client. It comes installed on every Mac, costs nothing and works with practically every email provider. Yet I prefer using Mimestream’s native macOS app to manage my email.
That’s not because Apple Mail is a bad app. The problem is that Apple Mail treats Gmail like any other email service. Mimestream doesn’t, and that makes all the difference.
Apple Mail’s search has been broken for years, and everyone knows it. But iOS 27 should fix that.
When it arrives later this year, it will bring a completely rebuilt Mail search with features such as a new on-device index, relevance ranking and the ability to reindex old emails. The emails you know exist but can never find? Your iPhone will finally be able to surface them.
Some people achieve and maintain zero unread emails; some let that red badge climb into the thousands. It’s never too late to change your ways — you can become one of those clean inbox people like me. These six tips will help you get to Inbox Zero using features in Apple’s Mail app that you might not have known about.
The obvious Tip No. 0 is this: You should always hit the Unsubscribe button at the bottom of every unsolicited promotional email as soon as you get the first one.
After you kill all those unwanted subscriptions, these six lesser-known features of the Apple Mail app on iPhone, Mac and iPad will make you a true pro at managing your email.
You can save time — and make sure your messages always go out when they’re supposed to — when you schedule email from the Apple Mail app. You can set your mail to deliver at any date or time in the future, whether it’s next Monday at 9 a.m. sharp, in two weeks’ time or even years from now.
If you work with someone in a different time zone, you can schedule messages to arrive just when they start their workday, which is especially helpful if the allotted time is in the middle of the night for you. You can schedule a series of reminders for that one irritatingly forgetful client of yours. Or, if you work remotely, you can try (and risk) prewriting messages to your boss to maintain the illusion of regular work. You can even schedule emails to remind you of an important anniversary, years down the line.
It’s easy to set up. Keep reading or watch our short video.
Apple pushed iOS 18.5 beta 1 to developers within days of iOS 18.4‘s public release. While the latter packed several notable new features, the first iOS 18.5 beta sports relatively few changes.
Below are all the changes we have discovered in iOS 18.5 beta 1 so far.
An update to Apple Business Connect that launched Wednesday enables any verified business to control how it appears in Apple Maps, Wallet and Mail, even if they don’t have a brick-and-mortar storefront.
This should give consumers access to the accurate information they need about these companies because it’ll be supplied by the best source: the owners of the businesses.
Other changes should help protect consumers from phishing attempts.
The Reply button in the iPhone version of Apple Mail does a whole lot more than let you reply to messages. For some reason, Apple packed it with unrelated options.
Here’s everything lying hidden behind that simple button.
Apple Mail for iPhone, Mac and iPad is getting a real dose of artificial intelligence. When it next version launches in the autumn, it will be able to summarize emails, assign them to categories based on their contents, and draft replies to messages so the user doesn’t have to.
“Staying on top of emails has never been easier,” promises Apple.
Sending an email still works basically the same as it has since the ’90s. But these days, people want modern features — like scheduling emails and undo send. Apple Mail may not be the most radical email client, but it has a lot of smart features hidden around every corner.
You can quickly take back an email if you forget to include an attachment, or schedule an important email way in advance. You also can get smart reminders to read email later, and alerts to send a follow-up. If you catch a typo just as you hit send, you can take it back and make your edit before it’s too late.
Read to see how it all works.
Alongside a slew of software updates announced at WWDC22, Apple said its Mail app will let you schedule email delivery and undo sends, among other changes that bring the client closer in functionality to some of its leading competitors.
That’s handy for shooting off emails at ideal times and for clawing back those notes you realize you shouldn’t have sent (you know, because you forgot the attachment, not necessarily because you said something awful).
A cluttered email inbox is as aggravating as it is common. Everyone deals with it, but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it.
Instead of constant distractions, and sifting through piles of unnecessary and unwanted emails, you can take control of your inbox. Finally achieve that fabled zen state known as inbox zero with a lifetime subscription to the Mailman email manager.
It’s a web browser plugin that works with Apple Mail, Gmail and other popular email clients. And it’s on sale for a limited time.
Apple is bringing big privacy-focused changes to its Mail app and other parts of its ecosystem, the company said Monday.
“At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior VP of software engineering. “We don’t think you should have to make a tradeoff between great features and privacy. We believe you deserve both.”
Update: Apple changed the status on iCloud Mail from “issue” to “resolved issue” on Thursday afternoon. Problems with the service persisted for about 5.5 hours before being fixed, though.
It’s not just you having problems with an Apple email account. Apple reports that iCloud Mail has been having an ‘issue’ for several hours.
The service is not completely offline, however.
Researchers in Europe have discovered a way to read the contents of encrypted emails sent with iOS and macOS devices. The so-called Efail exploit is significant enough that the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls it an “immediate risk.”
Apple is certainly working on a patches for all its devices, but there are ways to protect your laptop, phone and tablet now.
Anyone who sends a lot of emails knows that a little extra efficiency goes a long way. Whether it’s typing out the same canned response over and over, combing endless threads, or just entering your name. Apple Mail and Outlook are great, but they can fall short for power users.
This post is brought to you by Feingeist Software, maker of MailButler.
If your inbox is a disaster zone that fosters common email mistakes, perhaps it’s time to get a little help. MailButler is a simple plugin that adds lots of features and functions to the stock Mail app on your Mac. It will help you avoid the dreaded “accidental send” and other common email mishaps.