Best Gmail App For Windows 10 / 7 / XP in 2021. Top 5 Tools Reviewed

Looking for a nice Gmail App for Windows 10, 7, or XP to conveniently manage your Gmail account from desktop?

Email clients like Mailbird, Foxmail, Opera Mail, etc. sync with your mail account and allow you to access your Gmail (and other email accounts) straight from your desktop.

Forget about logging onto a web browser or typing www.gmail.com every time. Just open your Windows start menu, click on the app, and access your mail!

Simple, right?

It’s a common situation today, and some easy inbox management tips may help you not only sort out your emails more efficiently but boost your overall productivity at work.

Gmail Desktop Apps Covered in this Article

There’s more than just one Gmail Windows app for you to try. In this post, we’ll cover these 5 best Gmail desktop apps for Windows:

1. Mailbird
2. Foxmail
3. Opera Mail
4. Inky
5. Claws Mail

We’ll also cover the following aspects for each email client reviewed:

• Key Features
• Advantages
• Limitations
• Integration with other tools
• Customer Reviews
• Pricing

So which of them is the “Gmail client to rule them all?”

 

Gmail app for Windows 10 / 7 / XP: Top 5 Options Reviewed

Let’s check out the top 5 Gmail desktop apps in 2021.

Ready?

Let’s get rolling.

1. Mailbird

Mailbird isn’t just another ordinary Gmail desktop app!

We’re more than just another good mail client. We also unify all your communication channels and even tasks, documents, and events.

You’ll be able to breeze through your Gmail inbox and do much more.

Here are a few ways how:

All Your Email Accounts in One Place

Mailbird lets you connect all your email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo mail, your Microsoft account email and other webmail clients – anything really) all into one integrated email client.

How does that help?

You have access to all your mail in one unified space. Say goodbye to juggling different apps – each with their web app password.

You can also manage accounts by color coding each of them separately. You‘ll never make the mistake of mixing up different accounts.

(Note: you may have to disable two-factor authentication when you’re connecting more than one Google account here)

All Your Calendars Organized Together

With Mailbird’s native calendar, you may eliminate one of the biggest Gmail’s pitfalls that concerns its calendar app.

What happens when you want to add your corporate or another non-Gmail calendar to keep track of all of your events in one place? You need to use sticks and spikes and find unobvious ways instead of just adding another account. Yes, Google is jealous. They don’t like when you use other email providers, but sometime you need to.

With Mailbird, things become much easier. You add all your calendars into its native calendar app and here you are! You can easily manage all your meetings and events in the same interface, including the sidebar view

Snooze Emails for Later

What’s your worst thing you could see when you open Gmail?

Tons and tons of unread emails in the general tab of your Gmail inbox.

Mailbird lets you snooze your emails for specific periods. They’ll be placed in a designated snooze folder until the specified date arrives. (This is the easiest way to keep your general tab clean and clutter-free!)

And don’t worry.

You’ll never forget that snoozed mail. You’ll receive notifications and reminders at a specified date so that you can respond to them with ease.

Replies Are A Piece of Cake

An average employee receives over 100 emails at work a day.

Replying to every person can be a headache. But what can get really messy is replying to emails with a series of questions and different statements. You could easily overlook a question.

You could avoid this disaster with our in-line reply feature.

This gives you the ability to respond to questions or statements in incoming mail directly underneath them.

Check the image below. Notice how this feature will save you time?

Supercharge Attachments

With Mailbird, you can do so much more when it comes to attachments.

• Find Attachments Easily

No need to spend an entire hour searching for that attachment you received weeks or even years ago.

With Mailbird’s attachment search feature, simply type in the file name.

And voila – it’s there for you!

• Open Attachments Safely

We’ve all received suspicious work email messages from time to time. Sometimes though, it could be an important document. So what do you do  – ignore it or risk your PC’s security?

With Mailbird, users don’t have to choose.

The attachment preview feature lets you take a look at what the document contains without having to open it at all.

Contact Management Is A Breeze

Without your contacts, there would be no emails. So it’s understandable that your contacts need to stay at the forefront of your email process.

Here are a few ways Mailbird makes sure of that:

• Syncing Contacts

Mailbird makes it ridiculously easy to select and import contacts from your Outlook and Gmail accounts. Adjust your gmail settings and permissions and there you have it – all your contacts in your new gmail client – in a matter of 20 seconds!

• Merge Duplicate Contacts

Mailbird makes it easy to automatically merge duplicate contacts so that you’re not sifting through people twice when drafting a new email.

If two contacts aren’t listed down as 100% similar – you have the freedom to choose the default email and contact details manually.

• Copying Contacts

Mailbird makes copying contacts from different email accounts and placing them into groups a piece of cake.

Simply drag and drop a contact from your email account into where you want them in Mailbird to create a new set.

That’s it. It’s that easy.

Speed Reader

We’re super proud of this feature.

Did you know that people spend around 2.5 hours on average daily reading emails?

That’s an unbelievably long time!

To help reduce that, we’ve tried to create a speed reader that displays one core word at a time so that you can stay focused and zip through your email messages. Users can speed up the process by 3x as a result!

We’re the only free email client app in Windows to offer this feature.

Check out some more info on our tech in this TechCrunch article.

Onboarding Is A Breeze

Setting up most other mail for Windows is complicated, confusing, time-consuming, and buggy!

That’s why we have made Mailbird so easy to set up!

Here’s how simple it is to get started with Mailbird:

Step 1 – Download

Download the Mailbird application from our website and proceed to install it on your desktop. (You can also try out our Offline Installer in case you’re having difficulties trying to configure it.)

Step 2 – Add Details

When you open Mailbird for the first time, you’ll have to adjust the account settings.

This is a lot like adjusting your Gmail settings for the first time.

You’ll first be met with an “Add Account” dialog box. Put in your name, default email address, and password and Mailbird will do the rest.

Step 3 – Add More Email Accounts (Optional)

To add additional personal email accounts, right-click on the Menu tab at the top left of the screen, and it’ll open up a drop-down menu.

Next, select the Settings icon and click on “Add” to input each email address from your multiple email accounts. (You can delete the account you added later.)

Step 4 – Automatic Detection

You’ll now be prompted with a Network Settings icon.

Just add your email and password there, and the system will automatically detect the server settings – it’ll know if it’s a POP3 account or if it’s an IMAP email service.

(In case you’re using a custom domain email account, you’ll have to manually input the outgoing server SMTP or email program into Mailbird)

Optional Steps (Just for Fun!)

Step 5

Now you can customize the email app settings to suit your preferences.

You can add a profile photo by connecting to Facebook. Or you can skip this step entirely.

Step 6

You can now customize the design options regarding layout and theme.

You could choose a light theme, dark theme – or customize one entirely! You could use the typical on-screen Gmail keyboard or use a custom keyboard too.

Same goes for your layout — Mailbird will adjust it all to your preferences.

Don’t worry about making the wrong choice – you can always change this later.

You’ll then be asked to select which integrations you’d like to add from a drop-down menu such as Slack, task management apps, etc.

Just add your web app password and details for each of these apps and click Continue.

And that’s it!

Integrations Galore

Mailbird can integrate with numerous different apps – be it productivity apps like Asana, grammar apps like Grammarly, file uploads apps like Dropbox – you name it.

Here are just a few and what they can do for you:

• Followup.cc

Keeping track of all the emails you have to reply to isn’t easy.

To help you, Mailbird can integrate with Followup.cc – a service for follow-up notifications.

You can use the Followup.cc addon to schedule follow-up reminders and notifications right from within the app itself.

Just click on the icon in the mail, and it’ll give you a drop-down menu where you can select when you want to be notified. This way, you can send out replies with ease.

• Dropbox

To help send large attachments, Mailbird can integrate with Dropbox.

Just link your Dropbox account, and you’ll see the icon at the bottom of the compose window. Just click on the button to add attachments from Dropbox to send them.

Attachment uploads were never this easy!

• Whereby, Slack and Whatsapp

Sometimes, you need more than emails to get the message across.

Do you sometimes prefer a Whatsapp text, a Slack message or a Skype video call?

Why not let your Gmail client operate as a task manager too?

To help your team collaborate better, we’ve teamed up with the popular video conferencing app Whereby.

You can create ‘rooms’ for your team and hop on a group call with them instantly. You can also browse through your mail and attachments mid-call.

Mailbird also integrates with Slack and Whatsapp so you can have instant conversations!

The best part?

You can do all this without downloading any additional software.

Mobile Version

We’re working on a mobile app for Mailbird too. Soon you’ll be able to find Mailbird on your mobile device — be it an android, iPhone, or iPad or even among the Windows Store apps!

Advantages

• Feature-rich free version
• Sleek and easy-to-use interface
• Supports both IMAP and POP3 accounts
• Highly customizable — can change background themes and layout
• Plenty of keyboard shortcut options
• Multiple integrations to make onboarding easier and boost productivity
• Great customer support

Limitations

• Is not available as a mobile app yet or on an App store like the Windows Store or PlayStore. You’ll have to download it directly from the Mailbird website.

Pricing

Mailbird offers you a Lite version that’s completely free. With it, you get support for POP and IMAP accounts, a Contact Manager and a whole list of integrations. You’ll also get access to a free 30 day trial of our Pro variant once you sign up.

You can get the Pro version for an annual fee of $12/year.

Alternatively, you could opt for a lifetime subscription for a one-time fee of $33.75.

Both paid options come with a 14-day money back guarantee in the unlikely event that you’re not satisfied with our service (which we hope not!)

Customer Ratings

• Capterra – 4.5/5 (276 reviews – March 2021)
• Trustpiot – 4.5/5 (276 reviews – March 2021)
• G2Crowd – 4/5 (55 reviews – March 2021)

2. Foxmail

Foxmail is akin to its namesake from the animal kingdom.

Just like the sly fox, Foxmail is a speedy email client for Windows with a few tricks up its sleeve.

The latest reiteration of the Foxmail desktop app closely resembles Outlook – although far smoother and less cluttered. Anyone familiar with an Outlook tab should be able to transition to this desktop application quite painlessly.

Want to know what the app offers?

Foxmail provides you with a helpful notepad button feature in the tab that allows you to record notes while working. You won’t have to use reminders or another app to note down and compose valuable information that you find in Gmail messages.

They’ve also tried to make it user-friendly by giving you a reply, delete and forward shortcut button at the top of the compose window screen. It makes moving through Gmail messages in the desktop application super easy.

The major drawback when it comes to this Gmail desktop app is that the default installer isn’t in English.

Additionally, users have to restart the application every time any change is made to the sync settings. However, their website does state that they will be able to support Outlook mobile and have a mobile app for your iPhone and iPad, and Android device soon.

Advantages

• Can support most POP3 accounts
• Quick and user-friendly web interface
• Good spam filtering abilities

Limitations

• Installer isn’t in English – onboarding can be hard
• Doesn’t support IMAP accounts
• Re-wrapping text in Gmail messages with their editor is difficult

Pricing

Foxmail is completely free of charge

Customer Ratings

G2Crowd – n/a

Capterra – n/a

 

3. Opera Mail

 

If you’re looking for a desktop email app aimed at mail for Windows – Opera Mail could be a good addition to your Windows start menu.

Opera Mail originally debuted as one of the web apps alongside the Opera web browser. At the time, it was one of the best Windows email clients. However, while it’s still a solid offering to manage accounts, it’s in dire need of an overhaul.

Not what you would expect in the best email client for Gmail. 

There are a lot of things that Opera Mail does right though.

For one, you can add more than one mail account to it. Secondly, it supports POP and IMAP , along with Atom, and RSS feeds.

Lastly, Opera stores all your data on an indexed database. As the data is readily available, reading, labeling, and filtering all your mails is easy. You also have the option to add custom tags to certain people or mails. This way, you can highlight and demarcate any priority targets with ease.

A big issue with Opera though is its mailbox sync settings.

The sync settings don’t allow you to import data from other modern email clients easily. This was the case even back when people used Windows Live Mail.

Trying to configure Opera Mail has always been a difficult task. As a result, trying to sync all your contact details into Opera Mail isn’t always possible.

Advantages

• Free to use
• Supports POP and IMAP accounts
• Incoming mail server has an indexed database to retrieve and filter mails easily
• Can add multiple email accounts to easily switch between them

Limitations

• Outdated web interface that leaves a lot to be desired
• Cannot import data from other Windows email clients
• Not being actively developed and supported

Pricing

Opera Mail is free.

Customer Ratings

G2Crowd – n/a

Capterra – n/a

 

4. Inky

Inky is a good option when it comes to Windows mail apps.

The first thing that hits you about it is how much the app offers you in terms of security.

They go above and beyond when it comes to ensuring the safety of your information. Inky automatically incorporates end-to-end encryption and digital signatures on the outbound and incoming mail server. As a result, your mail account, app password, and email address will never get into the wrong hands.

Good luck hackers, you’re not getting in here.

Apart from their security features, Inky in itself is a great email client. Their mail app for Windows works with all POP accounts like Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL. It’s also compatible with IMAP and Microsoft Exchange. So you can manage accounts easily.

The only issue with Inky is a lot of their additional features are limited to their pro and enterprise versions. While their free version supports Gmail, Windows Live/Outlook, and Mac clients like iCloud, you get access to Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Google Apps, and other IMAP accounts only with the pro version.

The Enterprise email program gives you customized solutions, volume discounts, phone support, and MDM/EMM solutions.

Another issue with Inky is its reputation for being glitchy. You may have to open up Task Manager to manually close and restart it on occasion.

In many ways, Inky is a lot like EM Client – another desktop email client with good features but limited by their free offerings.

So while Inky is a great Windows mail app, for you to truly enjoy it, you’ll need to get the paid version.

Advantages

• Very good security features to ensure the safety of your information at all times
• Compatibility with POP and IMAP accounts
• Easy to setup and operate

Limitations

• Free version isn’t as feature rich
• Reputation for being glitchy at times
• No way to set new filters for email messages

Pricing

Inky’s pricing details aren’t mentioned on the site — however they do mention that pricing is based on per mailbox per month. They also offer you volume discounts and special pricing for educational and nonprofit customers.

Customer Ratings

G2Crowd – n/a

Capterra – 4.5/5 (3 reviews)

 

5. Claws Mail

Claws Mail is another good Gmail client for Windows 10.

One of the coolest things about this email service is that it’s an entirely open-source project. What that translates into is an ever-increasing set of tools, tabs, and add-ons for it’s email program.

Insiders get access to new features before it is rolled out to the general populace. Additionally, it doesn’t have a limit on the number of email accounts you link.

Another thing that this client for Windows does really well is their filtering. You can flag mails by sender, age, phase and more – making gmail inbox organization that much easier. It’s definitely a step in the right direction for anyone focused on getting a zero inbox on your device!

But it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. Claws Mail has its shortcomings.

The user interface is a lot like a web browser  – not a sleek one like Chrome, but rather a really dated one. On this feature, Claws lags behind Mailbird, Thunderbird or Easymail.

Secondly, when it comes to server settings, there’s no automatic setup for POP accounts like Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook mobile. Therefore, onboarding here for inexperienced users can be quite a task.

Advantages

• Open-source so it’s customizable with multiple email plugins
• Advanced filtering capabilities
• No limit on the number of linked accounts

Limitations

• Really dated web interface that isn’t user-friendly
• No automatic setup for POP3 accounts
• Trying to configure server settings can be quite daunting for a beginner

Pricing

Claws Mail is free.

Customer Ratings

G2Crowd – n/a

Capterra – n/a

 

How to create your own custom Gmail desktop app

Alternatively, you may simply want to create your own custom Gmail desktop app by pinning a shortcut to the Windows 10 taskbar. It’s relatively easy if you use the Chrome browser. 

You’ll have fewer options than with the Gmail desktop apps introduced previously but this shortcut could be just what you need, especially if you only use one Gmail account. 

If you have multiple Gmail accounts, then we would suggest you try one of the best email clients to manage multiple accounts. 

Without further ado, let’s see how to create your own Gmail desktop app.

How to create a Gmail desktop app on Windows 10

Step 1: Open Gmail on your Chrome browser and click on the three vertical dots in the right-hand corner to customize and control Google Chrome.

Step 2: Go to More tools and then click on Create shortcut…

Step 3: Give your Gmail desktop app shortcut a name and make sure the Open as window option is checked. Click Create.

Step 4: From there, you should see a new Gmail icon on your taskbar. Right-click on it and select Pin to taskbar.

That’s it! You have your own Gmail desktop app.

Bonus: if you want to access your Gmail account while being offline, go to Gmail settings and click See all settings.

Then go to Offline and tick the Enable offline mail option (you need to be the administrator of your Gmail account in order to enable this option).

Select one of the two security options. We recommend going with Keep offline data on my computer if you’re the only one using your computer.

Save changes. You’re all set!

 

Final Thoughts

There you have it.

These are the best options for a Gmail Windows 10 app in 2021.

Of course, there are other Windows mail clients as well, such as EM Client and Easymail. But we have covered the key ones.

Have you decided which will be your best desktop email client for Gmail?

Why not try Mailbird first before you give a final verdict?

You don’t need a credit card to sign up and installation takes just a few seconds. To switch to Mailbird to start supercharging your email download the free version!

 Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in February 2017 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.