Mimestream Review: This is the Mac app Gmail users need

The most important thing I can tell you mimestreamThis Mac email app only It’s just out of a years-long betais that it finally got me to stop going to Gmail.com.

I’ve tried a lot of email apps over the years, and they all have at least one fatal flaw. (Some have many.) Search is the most common reason: Very few apps can search messages as quickly or as quickly as Gmail, which is why I’ve tossed everything from Spark to Edison to Apple Mail to Newton over the years. But some apps have a hard time finding contacts, others do strange things with organizing my inbox, and don’t even get me started on apps that somehow seem unable to stay online and physically deliver all my messages. For years, I downloaded apps hoping for better, more authentic email tools out of the clutter of Gmail’s cluttered interface, and for years, I ended up reluctantly returning to the cluttered clutter.

Mimestream is different. The app, which was created by a small team led by Neil Jhaveri, does almost everything Gmail does at least as well as Gmail does. (Jhaveri is a former Apple engineer who spent a bunch of years working on Mail and Notes. The guy knows his apps.) In a lot of cases, that’s because he does. exactly The way Gmail does it – Mimestream makes heavy use of Gmail’s API for everything from mail retrieval to search.

In a way, Mimestream isn’t really an email app because it doesn’t use IMAP, POP3, and all the stuff of standard email apps. that it Gmail app. It doesn’t support Outlook or other email providers yet because Jhaveri and his team have been so focused on building a better way to do Gmail. (He says they’re working on Outlook support, though.) Instead of all the sidebars, tabs, ads, and auto-reply suggestions, Mimestream just gives you your email. Your inbox is on the left, and your open message is on the right. It looks more like Apple Mail than Gmail. It’s fast, clean, and not terribly exciting visually – but it’s probably for the best when it comes to email.

I’ve been testing the app for over a year now, and I don’t miss anything about Gmail. Mimestream carries the same keyboard shortcuts, the same labels and filters, and the same everything. Search is fast and great – because it’s just Gmail search presented in a new way. Mimestream has an undo send feature which has saved me countless times, supports all email aliases, and lets me respond to calendar invites. In almost every respect, Gmail performs better than Gmail.

However, there are a lot of things I’d like to see Mimestream added, starting with Windows and mobile apps. I also wish Mimestream made it easier to link to an email—right now, you can copy the link into any message, but that link only opens Gmail at the time it should actually open the Mimestream. It must support Outlook and other providers as well, especially if it wants to be people’s main email client. And Mimestream will eventually need a way to replicate Gmail’s plug-in architecture since there are plenty of power users who don’t want to get rid of Boomerang or Mailtrack.

Javieri says Mimestream is working on a lot of those things. Ultimately, one of his goals is to sell Mimestream licenses to companies, which makes plug-in and Outlook support even more important. He’s also convinced that Mimestream Mobile can be great.

Meanwhile, Jhaveri explains that the best use case for Mimestream is people with multiple Gmail accounts. You can add all of your accounts to Mimestream and either navigate through their individual inboxes or see them all in a consolidated list. Mimestream also supports Gmail inbox categories, so you can see promotions and updates separately if you prefer.

You can manage them further, too: If you have a bunch of work addresses or a few different emails that you use for personal stuff, you can group them under what Mimestream calls “Profiles” and see all the related messages together.

Mimestream also does some useful Mac-specific things that you can’t get from the Gmail web app, like integrating with Focus Filters and the native notification system so you can send alerts to one profile during the workday and another that does it on weekends.

Mimestream has some casual personal appeal, but it’s priced more like a tool for businesses and power users. It’s a subscription app and will cost $50 annually or $5 monthly, though you can get your first year for $30 during launch. That’s a lot of money to pay for a better looking Gmail! It’s nowhere near as expensive as $30 per month for a service like Superhuman, though, and it’s in line with other productivity apps like Fantastical or Todoist. Other email apps, like Spark Premium, are also at the same price. Jaffrey believes a few dollars a month is a fair price for a better email life. But in the end, for many users, Mimestream competes with free. And freedom is hard to beat.

Personally, I would pay for the annual subscription without much thought. I spend hours a day on my email and it is the source of so much information that I need minute to minute and day to day. As Gmail continues to be overrun with ads, Meet code, and feature creep, I’d be happy to shell out a few bucks a month for a better answer. Mimestream is the best of Gmail, minus the worst of Gmail. This is the app I was looking for.