Monthly Roundup: Mailbird for Mac continues to impress
Since launching in the fall of 2024, Mailbird for Mac has been praised by media and users for its ease of use, clean and modern design, and no-nonsense workflow. But that was only the beginning. See what Mailbird developers have been up to these past several months.
Despite the success of Mailbird for Mac, Mailbird’s development team refused to rest in the comfort zone. Instead, they kept driving forward.
They dipped into their big bag of wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if features they didn’t manage to include in the initial version, continued polishing design and usability elements to improve user experience—and, most importantly, reviewed hundreds of suggestions and requests from users.
Collaborative user-focused effort
“Our customers drive almost every decision we make,” says Michael Bodekaer Jensen, co-founder of Mailbird. “I speak with users multiple times every day, and we regularly collect feedback from our dedicated Early Adopters community.”
Armed with these insights and more than a decade of experience supporting millions of Mailbird for Windows users, developers prioritized features with the most meaningful impact on users’ day-to-day productivity.
However, the challenge was ensuring the integrity and seamless performance of the app while managing the various expectations and opinions of thousands of Mailbird for Mac users.
“Balancing quick development and delivery with quality and stability required tight collaboration within our team,” says Jensen. “We listened carefully to our early adopters, who helped us identify and fix issues. This real-time feedback was invaluable in refining features before wide release.”
Highlights of new Mailbird for Mac features
Advanced layouts: Fullscreen, horizontal, vertical
New layout possibilities allow users to personalize their email views and customize their workflow. They can choose from horizontal or vertical layouts—or minimize distractions with a fullscreen “Focus Mode”.
“Users consistently shared that distractions significantly hindered their productivity,” says Jensen. “With this in mind, we developed our new ‘Focus Mode’ to provide a distraction-free experience, allowing them to concentrate fully on their emails.”
Dark mode
A long-awaited feature, dark mode helps reduce eye strain and presents users with a sleek and modern look—especially useful when working in low-light environments.
“Our design team spent many weeks fine-tuning every pixel for dark mode and minimalist layout,” says Jensen. “We jokingly referred to this update internally as ‘the designer’s dream and nightmare’ because, as perfectionists, we battled to ensure readability and aesthetics were both impeccable.”
Custom contact avatars
Users can now replace default contact avatars with their own photos or custom icons, making it significantly easier to recognize priority, often-used, personal, or professional contacts.
Swipe to archive or delete
Always seeking new ways to improve user experience and streamline workflow, Mailbird developers added swipe support in conversation lists. Users can now swipe to quickly archive or delete selected messages.
Drag-and-drop support
Drag-and-drop support is now available for:
- Messages: Select one or more emails and move them between folders.
- Attachments: Select files from your computer and drag them into Mailbird to be sent as attachments.
+20 new keyboard shortcuts
More than 20 new keyboard shortcuts were added to give users quick ways to manage their inbox and messages. In addition, developers also optimized the performance of existing shortcuts.
“The passion users have for productivity features, such as keyboard shortcuts, is astonishing,” says Jensen. “One user humorously mentioned these shortcuts made navigating emails feel like playing a video game—quick, intuitive, and oddly satisfying.”
Leave Me Alone app
A recent partnership with Leave Me Alone, an email unsubscribe and inbox protection service, gives Mailbird users new and effective ways to manage their email. With tools such as Unsubscribe, Shielded Emails, Inbox Shield, and Rollups, the Leave Me Alone app helps users take control of their inbox and safeguard their privacy.
Reorder email accounts
Mailbird users who manage multiple accounts will appreciate the ability to customize their email accounts list. Now they can list them depending on their preference—by importance, most to least used, professional, or personal accounts.
Email address aliases
Whether for email organization, privacy and security, temporary use, or projecting a professional image, users can now create multiple email aliases and have everything forwarded to a primary account.
For instance, a solo freelancer can create “support@myCompany.com”, “info@myCompany.com”, “accounting@myCompany.com”. Email sent to any of these accounts will be forwarded to the person's actual email account (e.g., “sara@myCompany.com”).
Email aliases can also be used as “burner accounts” to anonymously sign up for newsletters and online services.
Outlook and Google calendar upgrades
Mailbird developers refreshed the design, improved the usability, and optimized the stability of the Outlook and Google calendar integrations.
“We wanted these two calendar apps to perfectly align with Mailbird’s intuitive and beautiful design,” says Jensen. “It was key for us that these calendars felt native and worked well as both sidebar and fullscreen apps, while still providing support for all the core calendar features.”
Many more features to come
All of the features mentioned in this article are already available in the current version of Mailbird for Mac. However, explained Jensen, users interested in exploring new features before they’re publicly available can apply to join the Mailbird Early Adopter program.
Come back for the next Monthly Roundup as we continue highlighting all the new features in the latest Mailbird for Mac.
