You could almost mistake it for Apple Mail, given its three vertical panes, with a left-hand sidebar for navigating among your Gmail accounts and their various message repositories and identifiers, a middle column that shows message lists, and a right-hand pane where individual messages appear.Īs a native Mac app, Mimestream has features you’d expect, such as message caching, offline support, macOS notifications, keyboard shortcuts, and toolbar customizations. Superficially, Mimestream doesn’t look all that different from other native Mac email programs. “Mimestream intends to showcase the best that the Mac has to offer, and new versions will generally require the latest version of macOS,” Jhaveri says. Mimestream works only in macOS 10.15 Catalina or later because, according to Jhaveri, it leverages APIs and capabilities (like SwiftUI) available only in the latest versions of macOS.
Though Mimestream will eventually be a paid app, it’s free to use while it’s in beta. Needless to say, you shouldn’t consider this article a formal review of the app. But the app is far enough along to pique our interest, and we wanted to tell you about it. Mimestream is very much a work in progress, and Jhaveri has a long list of Gmail capabilities that aren’t yet supported. Jhaveri worked on Apple Mail (among other projects) during his tenure at Apple from 2010 to 2017. Just log in and go, with no futzing to get email working properly, and with familiar Gmail features functioning as expected. Mimestream, created by former Apple engineer Neil Jhaveri, is a Swift app designed from the ground up for Gmail. Joe Kissell devotes an entire chapter of Take Control of Apple Mail to getting Gmail and Apple Mail working together, yet incompatibilities persist.Ī new desktop email app aims to sweep away such issues.
This is a reasonable approach, but an imperfect one, due to an architectural disconnect between Gmail’s labels and the limitations of the IMAP standard used by email clients. That’s how Google intends it to be used.īut many Gmail users prefer to use a desktop email app, such as Apple’s stock Mail app. It’s a no-brainer to use Gmail in a Web browser window on a desktop computer, such as your Mac.
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