Whether they will offer the same snappy performance as the Gmail accounts awaits to be seen, but I’m looking forward to finding out. On the plus side, Mimestream does also promise support for a greater range of email accounts, including Office 365, JMAP servers and IMAP servers. There’s no word yet on how much it will cost. “Instead of monetizing your e-mail data for advertising or market research purposes, Mimestream generates revenue by charging for software licenses,” the company’s FAQ reads. Mimestream is currently free but won’t be so for long. The default labels of ‘Gmail’ and ‘GSuite’ for my two accounts aren’t particularly helpful. It has support for multiple Gmail accounts too, although we’d like to see the option to rename the inboxes in Mimestream. Mimestream has full support for Gmail’s labelling system, and also pulls social media and promotional messages away from your main inbox, helping you to focus on the emails that tend to matter most.

In the inbox, emails appear in Gmail’s default conversation view, meaning if you get four or five replies to the same message from different folk, they all appear within the one message, making them easier to triage. There are no CC or BCC fields - you have to press a button if you want those to appear. It has only four buttons: one to adjust the font, one to insert emojis, one to add attachments and one to send. The new email screen is indicative of this stripped-back approach. Everything is simple, business-like, and geared to getting stuff done quickly, which is fine by me: the less time I spend dealing with my inbox, the better. There aren’t tons of icons, like there are in Outlook, and there’s barely a splash of color anywhere.

There is nothing fussy about the Mimestream interface. Outlook, on the other hand, is close to being the top resource hog. Outlook consumed 332MB of memory on my Mac, and Apple’s Mail used 145MB, Mimestream consumed around 80MB, making it one of the least demanding apps on my Mac. Mimestream is much less demanding of your Mac’s resources than rival email apps, too.

Using gmail on mac