Airmail Review: A Powerful, Customizable Mac Email App

Email is an inescapable part of modern life, especially for those of us who rely on it to run our businesses and stay connected with colleagues. The average professional sends and receives 126 emails per day, according to a report from Campaign Monitor. Multiply that by a five-day work week and it adds up to over 30,000 emails a year!

With that kind of volume, it‘s no wonder so many people feel overwhelmed by their inboxes. The right email client can make a world of difference, which is why I‘m always on the lookout for apps that promise to help tame the chaos. Over the past few months, I‘ve been putting Airmail through its paces to see if it lives up to the hype as one of the best mail apps for macOS.

The Current Mac Email Client Landscape

There‘s no shortage of email apps for the Mac, from Apple‘s free built-in Mail app to powerful clients like Outlook that are geared towards corporate users. But for a certain type of email power user—someone who wants more features and customization than Apple Mail offers, but doesn‘t need the complexity of Outlook—there are a few standout options:

• Spark – A well-designed free client with a smart inbox, email snoozing, and integrations with 3rd party services
• Postbox – A paid client marketed towards professionals with message templates, custom placeholders, and strong search features
• MailMate – A highly technical client designed for "power users" with extensive key bindings, Markdown support, and a flexible tagging system

And of course, there‘s Airmail, which has been my personal go-to for the past five years. Originally released in 2013, Airmail has evolved into one of the most polished and powerful mail clients for macOS and iOS. But does it offer enough to justify its $9.99 price tag when there are capable free alternatives? After extensive testing, my take is that for the right user, Airmail is absolutely worth it. Here‘s why.

Why Airmail Works for Me

I first started using Airmail when I was running my own business and juggling multiple email accounts—two for work, plus personal iCloud and Gmail addresses. Staying on top of customer inquiries, team communications, newsletters, and transaction notifications across all those accounts was a constant challenge.

What initially drew me to Airmail was its clean, modern design and the ability to see all my inboxes in a unified view. But what really sold me was how much control it gave me over my email workflow. Some of the things I now couldn‘t live without:

• Customizable keyboard shortcuts for filing messages into folders, archiving, replying, and just about every other common action. Once you‘ve internalized your most-used shortcuts, processing email becomes crazy fast.
• Granular control over how many lines of preview text to show, so I can get a sense of a message‘s content and urgency without actually opening it.
• The ability to sort messages by sender or subject, which makes it much easier to batch-process similar emails at once.

Airmail also integrates with the other tools I use to run my business, like Asana for project management, Evernote for reference material, and Calendly for scheduling. But more on integrations later.

I‘m not alone in appreciating Airmail‘s flexibility—in a 2019 review, The Sweet Setup named it the best email app for "anyone who wants powerful features and is willing to customize things to fit their own workflow."

A Closer Look at Airmail‘s Features

At its core, Airmail covers all the basics you‘d expect from a modern mail client, including:

• Support for all major email providers (iCloud, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, IMAP, etc.)
• Unified inbox
• Customizable swipe actions
• Snooze messages
• Send later
• Undo send
• HTML rich composer
• Calendar integration

But where Airmail really shines is in its more advanced features designed to help you process your email faster and more efficiently. Let‘s take a closer look at a few of my favorites.

Message Previews

By default, Airmail shows two lines of preview text for each message in the inbox. But you can bump that up to 5 lines, or set a custom number:

Having more preview text visible means I can often get the gist of a message and determine if it needs immediate action without opening it. Airmail also lets you tweak the appearance in other ways, like turning contact photos on/off and adjusting the size of the attachment previews.

This is the type of customization that sets Airmail apart—you can really dial in the look and feel to suit your preferences and reading style in a way that few other email clients allow.

Custom Actions

Another killer feature in Airmail is custom actions, which let you chain together multiple steps to process a message in a single click. Some examples of custom actions I‘ve set up:

• Respond to a message with a canned response and then archive it
• Forward a message to my task manager (Asana) and mark it as "To Do" in Airmail
• Send a message to Evernote and then delete it

Setting up a custom action is fairly straightforward. Just open Airmail‘s preferences, navigate to the Actions tab, and click the + button to add a new action:

From there, you can give your action a name and choose which individual actions to include. Airmail supports a wide range of actions, from applying labels to triggering system notifications.

Once you‘ve created a custom action, you can access it from the toolbar, assign a keyboard shortcut, or even add it to Airmail‘s contextual menu for easy access.

Personally, I‘ve found custom actions to be a huge time-saver, especially for repetitive tasks like filing receipts or quickly responding to common inquiries. And because they‘re so flexible, the possibilities are really endless.

Send Later & Snooze

As someone who often finds myself catching up on email outside of normal work hours, I really appreciate Airmail‘s "Send Later" feature, which does exactly what it says on the tin—lets you compose an email now, but schedule it to be sent at a specific day and time in the future.

I find this really useful for things like sales follow-ups, where I want to reach the recipient‘s inbox first thing in the morning rather than at 11 pm when I‘m actually writing the message. It‘s also great for "egregious send" times (as Cal Newport calls them) when sending an email immediately might create the unrealistic expectation that you‘re always available.

On the flip side, Airmail‘s snooze feature is great for getting messages out of my inbox that I can‘t deal with right away, but don‘t want to lose track of. With a couple clicks, I can hide an email until a specific date and time when it will reappear in my inbox, marked unread.

Power-User Features for Automation & Integrations

For even more control over your email workflow, Airmail supports a number of power-user features, including:

• Configurable keyboard shortcuts
• Markdown support in the composer
• Comprehensive filtering rules
• Custom plugins (requires some coding knowledge)

It also integrates with a ton of third-party apps and services—everything from project management tools like Asana and Trello, to note-taking apps like Evernote and Bear, to automation services like IFTTT and Zapier.

As an example, here‘s how easy it is to save an email as a task in Asana using Airmail‘s "Send to" menu:

Using Airmail‘s filtering rules, you can even set up this type of integration to happen automatically based on sender, subject line, or other criteria. For example, you could create a rule that automatically saves all emails from your boss to your Evernote inbox for easier reference.

I‘ve only scratched the surface of what‘s possible with Airmail‘s automation and integration features, but suffice it to say, if you‘re willing to put in a bit of upfront setup work, you can create some really powerful workflows to streamline your email processing.

Where Airmail Falls Short

As much as I like Airmail, there are a few areas where it could be better:

• 🐌 Occasional sync delays. I primarily use Airmail on my MacBook Pro, but also have it installed on my iPhone and iPad. For the most part, changes made on one device (like moving a message to a folder) sync seamlessly to the others. But every once in a while, I‘ll run into delays where an action doesn‘t show up on another device for a few minutes.
• 🤔 Confusing settings. With so many preferences to tweak, Airmail‘s settings can feel a bit convoluted and hard to navigate unless you know exactly what you‘re looking for. Some consolidation and simplification would make the app more approachable.
• 🚫 No Android or Windows support. While Airmail is available for macOS and iOS, there aren‘t any official apps for other platforms like Android and Windows. So if you need a truly cross-platform email solution, you‘ll need to look elsewhere.

To be clear, none of these are dealbreakers for me, especially since I primarily use Airmail on my Mac. But they are things to be aware of if you‘re considering making the switch.

Airmail vs. the Competition

So how does Airmail stack up against other popular Mac email clients? To help you decide, here‘s a quick comparison of how it compares to a few key alternatives on some important criteria:

Criteria	Apple Mail	Spark	Outlook	Airmail
Price	Free	Free	$79.99/yr*	$9.99 one-time
Cross-platform	✅ (iOS)	✅ (iOS, Android, Windows)	✅ (iOS, Android, Windows)	✅ (iOS)
Third-party integrations	❌	✅	✅ (Microsoft apps only)	✅
Customization	Limited	Moderate	Limited	Extensive
Snooze emails	❌	✅	❌	✅
Send later	❌	✅	✅	✅
Markdown support	❌	❌	❌	✅

^{*Price based on annual Microsoft 365 Personal subscription.}

Based on these criteria, Airmail compares favorably to the competition. While it may not be the absolute best in every category, it offers the most complete and well-rounded feature set for power users who are willing to invest some time in customizing it to their liking.

It‘s worth noting that Spark, in particular, is a very capable free alternative that shares many of Airmail‘s best features, like email snoozing and third-party integrations. In some areas, it even outshines Airmail, with built-in calendar integration and a smarter, more proactive approach to surfacing important emails.

So if you‘re looking for a powerful email client but don‘t want to pay, Spark is definitely worth checking out. Just keep in mind that you‘ll have to contend with a few more limitations around customization.

Final Verdict

After years of daily use, here‘s my honest assessment of Airmail:

It‘s an incredibly powerful and flexible email client that‘s well-suited for users who are willing to put in some upfront work to customize it to their needs and preferences. If you‘ve ever felt constrained by the limitations of Apple Mail or overwhelmed by the complexity of Outlook, Airmail is well worth the $9.99 price of admission.

Its extensive customization options, wide range of third-party integrations, and clever features like snooze and send later make it an indispensable tool for staying on top of a high volume of email. And once you‘ve set it up to your liking, Airmail is an absolute joy to use—fast, intuitive, and dare I say, fun.

That said, Airmail isn‘t for everyone. If you‘re looking for a more opinionated email client that works well out of the box, with a minimal feature set and a strong emphasis on simplicity, you‘re probably better off sticking with something like Apple Mail or Spark. And if you need an email client that works seamlessly across all your devices, including non-Apple ones, Airmail‘s iOS-only mobile support may be a dealbreaker.

But if you‘re a Mac user who lives in your inbox, values flexibility and customization, and is willing to invest some time in optimizing your email workflow, I wholeheartedly recommend giving Airmail a shot. With a free trial available on the developer‘s website, you‘ve got nothing to lose and a whole lot of productivity to gain.

You can purchase Airmail for macOS on the Mac App Store for $9.99. A free trial is available. The iOS version is available here.