![]() The main advantage of Mailbird is not that it’s a drop-in replacement for Outlook (unlike eM Client, reviewed here), but that it provides a more memory efficient and cleaner alternative to running multiple applications or a web browser with lots of tabs open. There were also some spelling and grammar horrors on the Mailbird support website, which had editorial staff grinding their teeth at the TechHQ offices, but wouldn’t matter to most people. This reviewer had a couple of minor niggles – there was no option not to use HTML for email for instance, and email tracking (via an embedded tracking pixel in outgoing messages) was turned on by default. That aspect of the application is not necessarily a bad thing after all, with today’s SaaS apps, a web browser is the only application that’s needed (ask any Chromebook user). In fact, the Mailbird application felt very much like a web browser in use, and the way it presents information and options right across the GUI. SOFTWARE The best email alternative to Outlook for PC? The eM Client review That embedding method becomes apparent when setting the application’s settings to use dark mode, a change that’s reflected in the “native” email windows, but not when browsing a user’s Google Drive, for example, which continues to appear black-on-white in an otherwise dark environment. The Mailbird developers have taken the same approach as several other PIMs ( RamBox, for example) and used an embedded web browser to link to the web interfaces of other applications, displaying third-party page content in a window within Mailbird. Mailbird “integrates” with many common platforms, such as Slack, Facebook Messenger, Google Drive, and Dropbox, but the term integration is misleading. Mailbird, however, went through several years of archived emails held on our Exchange server and not sync-ed locally, with very fast and accurate results. ![]() Search was a particularly noteworthy positive – an area where many locally installed applications stumble, unable to search further than through cached messages. Nevertheless, alternatives are now at least able to make a fair stab at providing access to the systems that are pretty much default for most organizations today. Mailbird integrated very well in our test environment, being capable of accepting or declining calendar invites (often a sticky area, historically), organizing emails, and adding new mailboxes to the O365 back end. To this day, it’s arguable that the full “experience” available from Microsoft’s office suite relies on using a fully-Microsoft client stack. That’s got a lot easier recently with Office 365’s internet-first ethos, but for many years, Microsoft’s approach was to go full-on proprietary to extinguish competition from open protocols. Like many applications, Mailbird interacts with EWS (Exchange Web Services) to handle the necessary communication between itself and the server. ![]() To don the mantle of the all-in-one Outlook alternative, any application has to be fully conversant in Microsoft’s proprietary protocols centered around its Exchange server. If your workflow is like many, and needs Outlook-like capabilities, then you’ll need to find an alternative that’s Outlook-compatible - but offers easier integration with non-Microsoft applications and services. The implication is that it would just be so much easier if you could just go ahead and use OneDrive, for instance. ![]() Furthermore, users that have a Google/Microsoft amalgam as a working desktop, for instance, are less favored by Microsoft software. ![]() It’s also old and old applications can suffer from feature bloat, a term that could have been (and probably was) invented for Microsoft desktop apps. Users are meant to get seamless integration between email, calendar, tasks, memos, and even messaging and video comms, as Teams takes its place in the Office suite.įor many users, however, Outlook isn’t the ideal app – it’s slow (perhaps due to its broader goals as the One App to Rule Them All), its interface is cluttered, and it adheres very much to the strict rules of Microsoft’s walled garden. ![]()
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