The perfect email app is a bit of a unicorn. Countless companies and startups have tried, and many have failed, to perfect the inbox experience and make peace with email and its soul-crushing inevitability in our modern digital lives. The goal is to make email feel manageable or, at the very least, to give you a pretty piece of mobile or desktop software you enjoy using. We may never achieve a sense of perfection when it comes to email, but many services come close.
On desktop, there’s lots of great options, from the esteemed Airmail on Mac, which costs $9.99, to the Google Inbox-like Spark. For the longest time, I had settled for the free app WMail, which takes the standard web Gmail experience and wrapped it up as a pleasant-looking piece of standalone Mac software.
Wavebox has Slack, Trello, and Google Apps built in
Similar to how Slack, Spotify, and many other companies develop desktop apps, WMail is built using GitHub’s Electron framework and powered using Chromium, the open source foundation behind Google Chrome. Effectively, these tools allow developers to take web apps and transform them into standalone desktop ones that function in identical ways, but with a few added bits of visual flair and functionality.
In March, the team behind WMail rebranded its app as Wavebox, a new fully-featured email and productivity app that goes well beyond the original idea of an email client. In fact, after using Wavebox for no more than 10 minutes after I first downloaded it earlier this week, I was confident in saying its the most powerful email app for Mac I’ve ever used. It’s available now for free (there are Windows and Linux versions as well), but the company behind it sells a $19.95 annual pro subscription for access to things like unlimited accounts and third-party app integrations.
Photo: Wavebox
Wavebox functions very much like its WMail predecessor — it too is built on Chromium and Electron. It lets you add a Gmail account, and then replicates all the very same settings you have on the web versions, including keyboard shortcuts, labels, and so on. It even lets you designate an account as an Inbox one, so you can use Google’s sleek design on, say, your personal email account while keeping the standard web Gmail look for your work one.