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Dec 3, 2018 - In selecting the best email app for macOS, we used the following criteria. + Command + A” in Mail.app (you can view a complete list of Gmail. Sure, there are Gmail for Mac apps like Mailplane, Kiwi, and Boxy, but they don't support non-Gmail accounts – since most people have a secondary work.
Resolution: 480 x 272 (iPhone & iPod compatible). Size: 10MB. Length: 3 minutes, 11 seconds To subscribe to the Macworld Video stream via iTunes,. You can also see a complete archive of all our videos on. Subscribe to that channels and you will be notified whenever we post a new video. Or just point your favorite podcast-savvy RSS reader to: Show transcript Hi, I’m staff writer Lex Friedman.
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Thanks for joining me for this Macworld Video Tip. I use Gmail for my email, but I don’t connect to it using Mail, Mailplane, Outlook, Sparrow, or another dedicated email client of that sort. Instead, I use Fluid. Fluid is an app from developer Todd Ditchendorf. It lets you turn web apps into Mac apps, by creating something called Site Specific Browsers—Or SSB’s. SSB’s, as the full name implies, are standalone browsers meant to point at a single site or URL. So, with Fluid, I get a regular icon in my Dock for Gmail, and it points to the Gmail Web interface I’m so familiar with.
Even better, as you’ll see, Fluid’s smart enough that it can even take advantage of true Mac app functionality like Dock icon badging, so I can see at a glance how many unread emails are demanding my attention. Here’s how to get started. First, download the Fluid app from the unsurprising URL fluidapp.com. It’s a free download, though there is a $5 upgrade option, which we’ll get to later. Once you have Fluid installed, launch the app. You only need to fill out four fields, and three of them are really easy.
For the URL, enter the link you use to access Gmail in a Web browser. For most of us, that’s Gmail.com; if you use Google Apps, that address might be unique to your company or organization.
Your best bet is to go to your email in your Web browser of choice, and then copy and paste the URL into Fluid. For the name, of course, enter the name you’d like to refer to your email account. I actually use two Fluid apps for Gmail; one for my personal email and one for my Macworld.com address, so I named one personal and the other Macworld.
Location refers only to where Fluid will place your soon-to-be-created app; Applications seems like a great place to me. You could, of course, manually move the app should you decide it belongs somewhere else. Icon is perhaps the trickiest part of this setup process, and quite frankly even it’s not too tricky. The default option is to use the website’s favicon—that’s the little icon that appears in the URL bar of your browser when you visit the site in question. That would be fine, if a bit lower quality than a traditional Mac icon. In my testing, however, Fluid doesn’t seem to pull down the Gmail favicon correctly anyway—so you’re left with a boring old generic Mac application icon if you go that route.
Luckily, the Internet offers an embarrassment of Gmail icon riches, perfect for use with Fluid. A popular Flickr group shares great Fluid icons, and Googling for “Gmail Fluid icons” will help you discover countless other sources, too. Find one you like, download it, and point Fluid to your image. Then tap the Create button, and you’re cooking with gas. Now, you can launch your newly-created app, and boom—Gmail’s available for you as a standalone application. You can switch to it like you would any other app, whether via Command-Tab, Mission Control, Spotlight, or any other means. Obviously, you can create Fluid apps for any website.
I use one for Google Calendar, and some use them for Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, and oodles of other sites. That $5 Fluid license we mentioned earlier?
It lets you separate Fluid app cookies from Safari’s, meaning you could be logged into two separate accounts, say, on Facebook—one in Safari, another in Fluid. You can also create apps that live only in the menu bar, not in the Dock.
And you also get the ability to run your Fluid apps as true full-screen apps in Lion. But whether or not you choose to pony up the five bucks for the extra features, Fluid offers an excellent way to turn the websites you rely on into standalone Mac apps. That’s it for this week’s video tip. I’m Lex Friedman—thanks for watching.
Is having her first experience with using Gmail, and, it, um, isn’t going as well as she’d like. The good news is that although Apple's Mail.app and Gmail have had a rocky relationship in the past, Mail.app in Yosemite works pretty well with Gmail, but there are some things that you should understand before you proceed.
Gmail without an @Gmail address Many businesses and schools use Google’s mail service for their email, even with their own domain names. This is commonly referred to as “Google Apps” (sometimes “Google Apps for Business” or “Google Apps for Work” or “Google Apps for Education” etc). For the sake of clarity and brevity, I will just refer to “Gmail” for “Email which is provided by Google, regardless of whether it is provided by your school, company, organization, or Gmail.com or any of the other country-specific Gmail domains.” You can log in to your Gmail account either by going to or by going to a special URL using your domain. For example, to check my MacStories email, I can go to. For the sake of simplicity I will refer to “Gmail.com” whenever I mean “the web interface for your Gmail account”. Do you have to use Mail.app? Ask any developer who has worked on an email app, and they will tell you that supporting Gmail is the bane of their existence, because Gmail uses its own protocol for email which is sort of like the standard email protocol (IMAP) yet very different in some important ways from standard email.
Although most Mac users are familiar with Mail.app, I think it is not the best way to use Gmail on the Mac. Most of Gmail’s features work best if you are using the web interface for Gmail, so I would encourage you to consider using that. If you want a separate app for email but still want to use the Gmail web interface, look at which offers that, plus the ability to use multiple Gmail accounts. If you need to be logged in to several Google accounts during the day for email, calendar, etc. Then I think Mailplane is, by far, your best option.
The other nice thing is that you can set Mailplane to be your default mail application, so it will respond to mailto links and email addresses from other applications. (I consider to be a far-superior mail app than OS X’s built-in Mail.app. It has many more features and functionality than Mail.app and I consider it the top “pro” app for mail on OS X.
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There are.) However, some people may have to use Mail.app, or they may feel strongly enough about it that they want to use Mail.app and don’t want to change just because they have to use Gmail. Gmail “Labels” are (mostly) like folders. Email folders are perhaps one of the most basic parts of using email for most people, and yet already we are going to run into a way in which Gmail is different than other mail systems. The primary difference between Gmail’s labels and other email system’s folders are that Gmail allows for one email to have more than one label. (You might think of this sort of like “tags” if you have used those in Finder, Evernote, or another program.) Every email that you have ever received to your Gmail account is stored in a folder/label called (reasonably enough) “All Mail”. However, a problem can appear if you have filters in your Gmail account which apply labels to incoming messages.
For example, I could have an email which comes to me from Federico Viticci which could end up in my “Inbox” as well as my “Important” label as well as another label called “Federico”. When I read that message through Gmail’s website, it will immediately be marked as “read” in the other labels as well. If I “delete” that message in one of the “Labels” the message is not really deleted unless I am in the “All Mail” label, in which case it will be deleted, after warning me that I will really delete the email if I continue. However, if I am using Mail.app, it may see that message as 3 separate messages in 3 separate folders, and it may not necessarily sync the read or deleted state of the message. This can lead to a lot of duplication and confusion, obviously.
We have now arrived at my first suggestion for using Gmail in a mail application: “Use as few labels/folders as possible.” There are several ways of managing this. You can create your own set of labels, of course, and you can sort your email, either using Mail.app’s “Rules” feature, or using Gmail’s “filters” feature, but my preferred way of managing this is to use. SaneBox is a web service which automatically categorizes your email based on smart filters that it creates and applies based on messages that you have sent and received.
It is far easier and smarter than making your own Gmail filters or Mail.app rules. When you sign up for SaneBox, it will connect to your Gmail account and then it will look at your mailboxes, especially your Sent mailbox, to try to automatically determine who are the most important people you email. (If you are squeamish about the idea of letting a company look at your email, SaneBox does this only by checking the headers of your email messages, not the contents and has a vested interest in protecting your privacy as a customer. They don’t have access to your Gmail password, and you can revoke their access to your account at any time.) SaneBox creates at least one folder called “@SaneLater” where it will automatically put all of your “Less Important” emails.
Your most important emails will stay in your Inbox. In my experience, SaneBox is extremely smart about this, but if it makes a mistake, all you have to do is save the email to the folder where it should have gone. For example, if an unimportant email ends up in your INBOX but it should have gone to “@SaneLater” just move it to “@SaneLater” and it will learn from this, and do that again in the future. If an important email ends up in “@SaneLater” simply save it to your INBOX and it will learn from that and do that again in the future.
The great thing about SaneBox is that you can use it in Mail.app, or Mail on your iOS or Android device, or the Gmail website, or anywhere else. You don’t have to install anything on your computer or your phone, because it all works server side. (SaneBox also has other great features, like the ability to put messages in a “Black Hole” where any future messages from that person will automatically be deleted.
It can also remind you of emails you have sent which have not been answered, and it can “hide” email until a later date if you want (i.e. If you see a message on Friday but can’t/won’t do anything about it until Monday, you can save it to a folder called “@SaneNextWeek” and it will automatically re-appear on Monday.) SaneBox is one of those services that I happily pay for every month because it has completely changed the way that I manage my email. Gmail Filters If you can’t use SaneBox (due to company policy, etc) or prefer not to, then your next best option is to create Filters using Gmail.com. These filters will be applied to all of your email messages as soon as they arrive at Gmail, and therefore the messages will appear sorted in your mail application on your Mac as well as any other device that you might use. Creating a Gmail filter is pretty simple.
My preferred method is to select a message that I want to filter (usually based on who it was from). Select the dropdown menu next to “Reply” and choose “Filter messages like this.”. From there you can just follow the prompts. The great thing about Gmail is that it will automatically show you the results of the filter, as you put it in, so you can see that it is working as you want. Mail.app Rules Mail.app rules might be the easiest solution, since you can control them right on your Mac, but they are my least favorite, because they only work once your Mac has had a chance to sync your email, which means that your Mac must be on 24/7. To create a Mail.app rule, go to Mail.app, then go to Preferences, click on the “Rules” tab, and then click “Add Rule”. From there it ought to be fairly self-explanatory.
Once you’ve done those steps, Mail.app should be automatically configured to send and receive email from your Gmail account. Gmail Pro-Tip: Limit IMAP folder sizes If you are in the habit of keeping a lot of email, you may find that Mail.app will eventually get very slow trying to keep up. This is especially true because of the “All Mail” folder. Gmail has a way to help with this, by allowing you to automatically limit the number of emails which will be shown in IMAP (that is, in your Mac or PC or iOS or Android mail client). You can limit it to the most recent 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, or 10,000 messages. Older messages will not be deleted but will simply not show up in your regular mail app.
To see them, you will have to go to Gmail.com and use the web interface. Based on my previous experience, I would not recommend anything over 5,000 messages, and would suggest 1,000 or 2,000 at the most. To find this setting, log into Gmail.com, click on the “Gear” icon, and then click on “Settings”. “Delete or Archive?” Setting up a Gmail account used to be somewhat confusing because when you would “Delete” an email, Gmail assumed that what you meant was that you wanted to keep it in the “All Mail” folder. That is no longer the case.
Any message that you delete via Mail.app will be sent to the “Trash” folder/label in Gmail, where it will be automatically deleted after 30 days. For best performance, I recommend moving read email out of your Inbox, either by deleting it or Archiving it. Mail.app has an “Archive” menu item.