When I searched for the best Mac email clients for Gmail/Google Apps users in September, I was surprised to find that there was an app built specifically for this purpose. You didn’t need to customize it, change its settings, or bolt on a bunch of extensions to make it work and feel right; Mimestream was both deeply hooked into Gmail and very much a Mac app.
Mimestream spent more than three years in a free beta period, releasing more than 220 updates for 167,000 users and adding more than 100 features. Now that a 1.0 release is out—and the company has grown from a solo developer to a five-person team—there’s a price for the product.
Mimestream is $30 per year if you buy during this launch period, then $50 per year after that (if you were a beta user, check your inbox for a bigger discount code). There’s still a 14-day, no-credit-card-required trial period. Individual users can install it on up to five devices, and there’s Family Sharing across iCloud accounts.
My favorite new feature in Mimestream is a separation of Profiles. If you use Google/Gmail accounts for both work and personal email, you can divide them across Work, Home, or other profile containers you define, each with their own colors and icons. I was only using Mimestream for my work accounts before this, but now I can keep my personal email accessible yet not intrusive.
I can also keep work email from creating notifications after hours. The new profiles work with a Mac’s Focus Filters so that only certain accounts inside a profile can send notifications when you’re in focus mode. Even if you’re not deep into Mac management, you can set basic on/off schedules for notifications inside the app for each profile.
The app’s server-side Gmail powers have increased with this release, too. You can create email filters and vacation responders that sync to your web-based accounts. Google contact colors are also synced over, and it’s easier to label and star a message while inside a message window.
Mimestream uses Gmail’s API, rather than a standard IMAP connection, to integrate more deeply with your setup on Google’s web app. As before, the company has none of your data on its servers, and your access tokens and cache are stored on a local Mac keychain.
Mimestream has one big, new feature that’s unintentional. The web version of Gmail now sprinkles advertisements around your inbox, not just at the very top. Minestream does not. I’ve recently started seeing these, and while they’re labeled, they’re still irksome to have to see and tap past. Given how far Mimestream has come and what else might arrive from a dev team that’s kept busy, I have very few reasons to see ads these days.
