Mailbird

Score9.9 out of 10

10 Reviews and Ratings

What is Mailbird?

Mailbird is a desktop email management client for Windows and Mac. The email client works with any IMAP, POP3 or Exchange email provider, and supports G-Suite (now Google Workspace) and Outlook users.

Mailbird users can manage all their email accounts from a single pane of glass, keeping personal and business emails separate, while managing them both from a unified interface.

Mailbird aims to enhance the end user experience through integrations with popular social media apps, as well as business productivity and team collaboration apps, such as Asana for task management, Google calendar, Dropbox for file sync and share, WhatsApp and Slack for instant messaging and Google Meet for video calling amongst others.

TrustRadius Research Team Review for Mailbird

What is Mailbird?

Between work and personal email, American workers spend an average of 5 hours per day checking their email. Mailbird is designed to help users deal with their email more efficiently.

PC users (Mailbird is currently only available as a Windows application) with multiple email accounts use Mailbird to manage multiple accounts in one location. Ideally, it will help users save time and ease organization processes while they do.

Who are Mailbird's Competitor's?

Mailbird’s most direct competitors are other email management tools like:

Mailbird also competes with individual email service providers, like Gmail and Outlook, which are what people use to manage each of their email accounts individually.

Unified Email Accounts Management

Mailbird users at all tiers can add an unlimited number of accounts. Mailbird supports all the major email protocols (IMAP, POP3, and Exchange), so the vast majority of email accounts will be compatible. Mailbird will automatically detect your email server settings (at least for the more common platforms), and they also provide a list of mail settings for several hundred email servers to make setting up your accounts in Mailbird a little easier.

Mailbirds account management page shows a list of email accounts with options to add edit remove or set an account as default — Mailbird’s account management page - image from Mailbird

Once you’ve added two or more accounts, you can choose to enable a unified, or smart, inbox where you can see incoming messages from every account. You can differentiate between these accounts by assigning each one a color. When you receive emails, an account’s color will encircle the sender’s icon to indicate which account received the email.

Mailbird's unified inbox with color coding - image from Mailbird

Although the color coding helps to differentiate between emails sent to different accounts in the unified inbox, some users have reported that it can be difficult to remember which color is assigned to which account. This is especially true for users who have more than two or three accounts in a unified inbox.

Email Management

Mailbird users can also manage all their email accounts in more detail separately. You can organize your emails within Mailbird the same way you can in a desktop email app. This includes creating new folders or applying filters and rules to incoming and inbox emails. Any actions like this that you take in Mailbird will sync to your email accounts.

Mailbird’s feature set places a lot of emphasis on streamlining reading, replying to, or otherwise dealing with emails. There are keyboard shortcuts for most common actions, like forwarding an email or moving it to a folder.

Some of Mailbird’s more unique time-saving features are its built-in speed reader and the ability to snooze email chains. You can choose to speed read an email by having one word at a time flashed on the screen (at a words per minute rate you can customize). The speed reader can only detect text that’s in the body of the email itself, so users note that this feature is less useful for emails with a lot of inline attachments.

Mailbirds speed reader in progress It displays the current reading speed in WPM and one word further in large type — Mailbird’s speed reader in progress - image from Mailbird

The snooze feature is perhaps more widely useful. If you’re cc’d on an email chain that’s receiving a lot of replies, or you’ve read an email but would like to be reminded to reply to it later, you can send it to a snooze folder for a specified amount of time. You won’t get any notifications for the email while it’s snoozed, and it’ll show back up at the top of your inbox for you to manage when the snooze time period you’ve assigned is over. This feature is a user favorite, frequently praised as a time and stress saver in reviews.

An email is selected via right click and a list of options is displayed with an arrow pointing to snooze The initial options menu includes reply reply to all forward mark as unread mark as important mark as starred mark as spam copy to move to print conversation snooze archive and trash all of which display keyboard shortcuts as well The snooze menu gives a list of times later today tomorrow evening tomorrow the weekend next week someday and pick date time — Mailbird’s snooze feature and other keyboard shortcuts - image from Mailbird

Other convenient email composition features include the send later and the undo send buttons. The latter returns an email to draft mode after you’ve sent it, which is useful if you catch a typo or missing attachment. You can customize this feature, making the button available for up to 30 seconds after you’ve sent the email.

You can also schedule emails to send later. You'll likely appreciate having this feature for all your email accounts if you collaborate across time zones, work odd hours, or otherwise worry about sending people notifications outside their work hours. One caveat is that the email will only be sent at the scheduled time if Mailbird is running, which means your PC needs to be on. Otherwise, it will send the next time you open Mailbird.

One email management feature that many Mailbird users suggest could use improvement is the search functionality. Mailbird offers an industry-standard advanced search, allowing users to search for terms within subject lines, email text, and from and to fields and apply a variety of filters. Some users report that this search doesn’t work as expected, returning emails that don’t meet the search criteria. Searching for attachments is also a separate process that requires users to open a separate search box, which can be frustrating or confusing.

Mailbirds advanced search The fields available are from to subject has words doesnt have size date within search in read status and has attachment — Mailbird's advanced search - image from Mailbird

Contact Management

In addition to managing emails across all your accounts, you can manage all your contacts in one place with Mailbird. You can sync contacts with Gmail and Outlook accounts directly. For all other email providers, you need to export your contacts in vCard format and import them into Mailbird, and vice versa. You can also create new contacts within Mailbird that aren’t associated with any specific email account.

If you often email the same people from different accounts, you’ll likely end up with some duplicate contacts. Mailbird offers two options for handling this: you can either merge the contacts or link them. Merging the contacts will combine the information from both, but delete one entirely. If you’ve set up automatic syncing, this will also delete the contact in your actual email account. Linking contacts preserves each instance of the contact associated with each separate account, but lets you quickly edit them together or individually.

An example of a linked contact in Mailbird At the top of the contact details page it shows small logos associated with three different email accounts the contact is associated with — An example of a linked contact in Mailbird - image from Mailbird

Having multiple ways to handle duplicate contacts sets Mailbird apart from its direct competitors. eM Client allows users to pair contacts from chat accounts with email accounts (and has an automated deduplication tool to assist with detecting matches, something Mailbird lacks), but not to pair contacts between accounts. Mailbird’s lack of automated contact matching means you do have to find and link or merge duplicate contacts manually, though.

Mailbird’s other more unique contact management feature is a built-in LinkedIn lookup shortcut. Right-clicking on a contact or an email sender brings up the option to search for them on LinkedIn. The usefulness of this feature is probably dependent on how important LinkedIn networking is to your job: for a recruiter, for example, this might be a major bonus.

Calendar

Much like email and contacts, you can view all calendars associated with your email accounts in one place in Mailbird. It can sync directly with Google, Outlook, and any Exchange protocol calendars. iCloud calendars must be imported and exported as .ics files. Mac and Apple support is an all-around weakness of Mailbird. As with contacts, you can also create calendars that are unique to Mailbird.

Competitors all support calendar syncing using CalDAV protocol instead, though you have to get an add-on to add a calendar to Thunderbird at all. Functionally, this should work more or less the same once the calendar has been synced, but Mailbird’s initial calendar synchronization process is a little smoother for accounts with the most common email providers.

Email Tracking, Privacy, and Security

One handy feature for those who want to be absolutely sure their emails are seen is Mailbird’s email tracking. Email tracking tells you exactly who opened your email and when. This tracking is based on remote image (images that appear in the body of an email) downloads, so it won’t work if an email’s recipient has remote images disabled. eM Client can do this as well, but other direct competitors do not.

Mailbirds email tracking Next to a sent email there is a double checkmark When clicked the double checkmark displays a list of recipients and the times they opened it — Mailbird’s email tracking feature - image from Mailbird

As far as your own privacy goes, Mailbird’s default setting is to disable automatic remote image downloads so your email activity can’t be tracked. Other than that, Mailbird does not offer many additional security features beyond what your email providers do. Competitors like Thunderbird and eM Client support PGP-based end-to-end encryption capabilities and master passwords protecting all your accounts. eM Client also offers more granular permissions concerning remote images, and Thunderbird has spam and phishing detection capabilities.

User Interface and Customizability

Mailbird is highly customizable, and most users report being able to set it up in a way that works well for them. For the display, there are several basic layouts to choose from, light, dark, and “full dark” modes, and the ability to add a custom theme or choose from a variety of theme templates.

Mailbirds appearance settings page It shows options for layout light and dark mode theme color background and whether or not to display certain messages — Mailbird appearance settings - image from Mailbird

Beyond the basic layout, each feature is highly customizable as well. You can customize things like the top-to-bottom order your individual calendars are displayed in, what sound notifications make, and when to download emails or attachments.

Integrations

Asana
Dropbox
Evernote
Feedly
FollowUp.cc
Google Calendar
Google Drive
Google Meet
Grammarl y
Slack
Todoist
Trello
Veeting Rooms
WhatsApp
Whereby
Zerobounce
Degoo
Kin Calendar
Unroll.me
WeChat

Although Mailbird touts a long list of integrations, users note that most of these tools simply run in the same window as Mailbird without providing many connected features. Mailbird also has a built-in Chrome browser you can enable and includes shortcuts to some popular blogs on its integrations list. Even without truly interacting with Mailbird, users appreciate that these integrations save time that would otherwise be spent context-switching between windows. Some users also report that adding too many integrations makes Mailbird run slowly or take up too much memory.

Pricing

Personal Yearly: $3.25/user/month
Personal Pay Once: $49.50/user + optional $10/year for lifetime updates
Business Yearly: $5.75/user/month
Business Pay Once: $99.75/user + optional $20/year for lifetime updates

Mailbird offers two different plans, each of which is offered as a yearly, software-as-a-service model or as a one-time purchase with optional yearly payments to get lifetime updates. The Personal plan does not support Exchange accounts, has fewer integration options, and only allows email tracking on 5 emails per month. Mailbird offers free trials for both plans.

Use Case

Mailbird is a great email management software for PC users with several email accounts to manage. Mailbird’s features make it particularly well-suited to those who receive a lot of emails and want to save time organizing and replying to them.

The lack of a mobile app or Mac software means Mailbird is not currently a great choice for anyone who prefers to check email across multiple platforms or on the go (or who is not primarily a PC user). If you are more concerned about additional security features than time-saving and organization, another software might be a better choice for you.