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by
Philippe Lehoux
March 29, 2022
· Updated on
Most people use a simple and static email signature telling basic information about themself and their company (job title, phone numbers, address, etc.).
Others have more complex usage; for instance, they will gather feedback on how well they answered their customer questions.
What if you could be more creative? For instance, what if you could change your signature copy based on the day of the week? Like adding the sentence "Have a great weekend!" in emails sent on Friday!
Let me show you how, with Missive, the best business email client.
Copy-paste the following code snippet in the signature editor where you want the sentence to appear:
{% assign today = "now" | date: "%A" %}
{% if today == "Friday" %}Have a great weekend!{% endif %}
The first line parses the current date and assigns the day value to the today
variable. The second line checks if the today
variable is equal to Friday and, if so, outputs the Have a great weekend sentence.
By adding an else
statement, you could display an alternative sentence. The below code will display Have a great weekend! on Fridays and Cheers, every other day.
{% assign today = "now" | date: "%A" %}
{% if today == "Friday" %}Have a great weekend!{% else %}Cheers,{% endif %}
Philippe Lehoux
How is this possible? Missive takes advantage of the powerful templating engine liquid.js that allows you to do crazy stuff! Learn more.
p.s. Thanks to Laura Soar, one of our customers, who suggested this cool idea.
March 25, 2025
Outlook vs Gmail for Business: Which is better?
Welcome to the great business email debate—Gmail or Outlook?
Welcome to the great business email debate—Gmail or Outlook?
Emails are the lifeblood of many businesses. They’re how people inquire about your services, it's how you communicate with clients and vendors, and maybe it's even how you communicate internally with your team.
We'll be doing an in-depth analysis of the two big email providers (Gmail vs Outlook). And give you the information you need to make a decision on which email service you'd like to build your communication system from.
We'll be going over:
There are two ways to create an email with Google.
You can either have a free, personal email address that ends in @gmail.com, with limited storage (15gb across your Google Suite), or you can pay for Google Workspace (Gmail for business) and create an email address with your business domain: @yourcompany.com, have more storage, and more admin/security controls over your email service.
The Google Workspace business plans vary:
Whether you have a Gmail account or a Google Workspace account, your inbox will look similar.
This is where Google shines. Their real-time collaborative documents were a game changer when they launched back in 2006 and has become the preferred tools for many organizations since.
When looking at Gmail's security measures for Google Workspace accounts, here are two that stand out:
Gmail uses TLS for email transit and has encryption at rest and in transit.
With over 1.8 billion Gmail users worldwide, there are some very well known issues and tradeoffs within the Gmail's functionality. Here are three common ones:
Like Gmail, Outlook is Microsoft's free, personal email service; Microsoft 365 is essentially Outlook for business, equivalent to Google Workspace.
Here's an overview of the Microsoft 365 plans (assuming an annual payment, as of April 1, 2025):
With thousands of enterprise customers, Outlook's security and privacy are tuned for those standards.
And just like Gmail, Outlook uses TLS encryption for email in transit. And data at rest is also encrypted.
As with most decisions in life, it depends.
Google Workspace is collaborative at its core, though its shared inbox and email automation options are more limited.
Microsoft Outlook is more robust in it's DNA overall, but can feel overly complex and lacking in modern design.
If your business prioritizes simplicity and collaboration with clients, team members, and vendors—I would err on the side of Gmail and Google Workspace.
If you work in a field with a lot of sensitive information (i.e. law, accounting, etc), then I would err on the side of Outlook and their very high standard for security controls.
Whether you choose Gmail or Outlook, there are some business email hygiene factors to follow:
Neither Outlook or Gmail was really designed for teams. They added on some lightweight features (shared mailboxes), but if you truly live in your inbox everyday, replying to clients, team members, and vendors—you'll want something designed specifically for team collaboration and shared inboxes.
That would be us—Missive!
Missive is an email client that sits on top of your chosen email service—whether that's Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, or Apple Mail.
It has all the features that are loved in Gmail and Outlook—labels, rules, snoozing, but supercharged with more functionality. Including AI powered rules that allow for auto-translation, auto-labeling, and so much more.
But don't just take our word for it, here's Arif, a lawyer and long time Outlook user, who recently signed up for Missive:
When I open Missive, I can hit Inbox Zero quickly. I never had that feeling with Outlook.
And here's Pat, a property manager and Gmail user, who recently signed up for Missive:
We’ve tried so many shared inbox solutions. Missive was unexpectedly powerful. Suddenly, we weren’t scrambling over lost emails or letting days slip by.
So whether you're Team Gmail for business or Team Outlook for business—you can try Missive today and get the best collaborative email client for businesses.
March 17, 2025
What Is the Best Email Client for Outlook? Our Top 6 Picks
Looking for the best email client for Outlook? We compare the top 6 Outlook alternatives based on collaboration, AI features, security, and pricing. Discover the best option for teams and individuals—whether you need shared inboxes, AI automation, or a unified email experience.
Email is the medium of business. It's how requests, deals, hires, are started and made.
Most businesses live in their inbox, whether they like it or not. And that inbox is likely an Outlook inbox — over 3.7 million companies use Microsoft Outlook for email management.
The are two main reasons for that:
However, like Word or Excel, Outlook was made mostly for enterprise solo use. It wasn't made for collaboration, even as the world of business and email moved towards needing more and more collaboration.
In 2025, several tools meet the security and control standards of Outlook while offering far more powerful inbox collaboration and coordination features suited for modern businesses.
We'll cover what to look for in an Outlook email client, introduce the six most popular third-party options, and break down their key differences.
All options have desktop and mobile email apps and support IMAP, MAPI, and POP3.
Plus, we'll cover a range of price points for the best Outlook alternatives—including ones that are free email clients.
Missive is a collaborative inbox for teams that run on email. This means it is designed with collaboration as a priority, featuring contextual in-email chat using @mentions—eliminating the need for forwarding.
You can assign or watch emails, and every action is logged—giving you visibility into emails and tracking who did what and when.
On top of that, Missive supports all email providers (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail, etc) and you can have multiple accounts (personal and business).
Under the hood, Missive has a powerful automation engine, allowing you to do things like:
From a security perspective, Missive meets the same gold standard as Outlook. They have an SOC 2 Type II report, encryption of data at rest and in transit, and they are GDPR compliant.
For pricing, Missive plans start at $14/user/month on an annual plan.
One thing to note, if you use folders in Outlook, they are called labels in Missive.
In the same way that some teams prefer Google Docs to Word because of their collaboration functionality (commenting, multi-player drafting, etc) — you may prefer Missive as your email app to Outlook, if you find yourself hitting reply all and forward all the time.
Thunderbird stands out as the only open-source email client.
It's a community-driven, free email client, that has been around for nearly two decades. With a thriving online community and an ecosystem of 1200+ add-ons (including AI-powered ones to help you draft replies), it's considered one of the best email apps for those prioritizing a free and open sourced solution.
If you're looking for an email client that has more collaboration functionality, Thunderbird's collaboration features come mostly from its third-party add-ons—things like mail merging and adding notes/comments to emails. Which makes collaboration possible, but likely a little unreliable given the nature of third-party connections failing from time to time.
From an organization perspective, Thunderbird calls their version of "folders", tags. Functionally, they are the same.
Thunderbird is a very privacy forward email app with built-in filters for phishing/spam and remote image blocking.
Though, it doesn't have the same compliance certifications (i.e. SOC or ISO) due to it's free and open-source nature.
Mailbird is for those of you who have way too many email accounts. It's known for it's unified inbox, where you're able to flow multiple accounts into the same consolidated inbox view.
Mailbird doesn't offer any features related to collaboration or coordination. It's more of a productivity improvement for Outlook power users who would like to integrate a few popular apps into their email workflow and see all emails in one place.
From an AI perspective, Mailbird offers simple AI drafting through ChatGPT.
Of all the Outlook alternatives on this list, Mailbird has the most similar user experience to Outlook—for example, their naming conversions are the same (folders are folders, and not labels or tags).
For security and compliance, Mailbird is only GDPR compliant and does not have any external audits or certifications.
For pricing, Mailbird has a free version as well as a premium version that's $4.99/user/month. There is also a pay once option to buy the product outright at $49.50 (standard) or $99.75 (premium).
If you manage multiple Outlook accounts and need a unified inbox for all your emails, Mailbird might be the perfect solution.
eM Client is a very similar email client to Mailbird. Most of their features are productivity focused for individuals—shortcuts, watch/snooze, configurable layout.
The most unique and powerful feature for eM Client is their search. Not only does the search cover all messages in your inbox, it can also search within certain types of attached files—think PDFs, Word docs, etc.
On the collaboration front, they don't have much beyond the ability to share folders (aka. labels), calendars, and accounts.
Like Mailbird, eM Client offers basic AI drafting to assist with typos and tone in your replies.
On security and compliance, eM Client is GDPR compliant (though possibly outdated with 2018 references) and does not have any external audits or certifications.
For pricing, eM Client has a sharp distinction between personal and business plans. There is a free plan for non-commercial use. The paid plans can be an annual subscription or a one-time payment.
The personal plan (without AI features) is $39.95/year or $49.95 as a one-time payment.
The business plan (with AI features) is $49.95/year or a one-time payment of $188.95.
Both one-time payment options do not include future feature updates. You can purchase lifetime upgrades separately at $90 per license.
If you're looking for a slightly more productive version of Outlook and you want a free email app because you're not using it for commercial purposes—then eM Client might be a good option.
If you're a Mac user and you really don't want to download another email client. Does the out-of-the-inbox (get it?) mail app from Apple work well for Outlook?
Well, compared to Thunderbird, Mailbird, and eM Client—Apple Mail isn't going to give you any increased functionality.
If you use Apple Mail as your Outlook email client, you won't have the integrated calendar or task management, and you'll have to remember that folders are "labels" in Apple Mail.
The good news is that Apple Mail can support multiple accounts from multiple providers (via IMAP and SMTP standards), so if you have a Gmail account and an Outlook account that you would like to unify into one very well designed, simple inbox—Apple Mail can do that.
If you want a free email client with a cleaner design than Outlook and don’t require advanced features, Apple Mail might be your best option.
When Superhuman first came out, it was solely focused on Gmail and Google email users. As of May 2022, they also support Outlook users.
From a user interface perspective, Superhuman is the most distinct of this list. It looks nothing like an Outlook inbox, so if familiarity is a requirement, this might not be a good fit.
Superhuman offers several AI-powered features, the most notable being its ability to answer questions about your inbox.
Instead of traditional search (even as powerful as eM Client's), you can ask your inbox direct questions. Instead of needing to remember a file's name to look for a specific piece of information, you could say: What was the price that John from ACME quoted me?
On the collaboration front, Superhuman offers the ability to @mention your colleagues through Team Comments.
From a security and compliance perspective, they are compliant with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, CCPA, and GDPR.
For pricing, Superhuman is on the higher end of these email clients, starting at $25/user/month on an annual plan.
To summarize our options for the best email client for Outlook users, we sorted them into two categories:
We hope this has been a helpful overview of the types of email clients that are out there for Outlook users. If you're interested in Missive, continue on and we'll get into some tactical information.
Stephanie at Lighting Dynamics, manages 100+ email quotes a day. Her team used to use Outlook for email management:
With traditional Outlook forwarding, once an email was out of the shared inbox, there was no visibility. We never knew if it had been handled. It was chaotic.
And now, with Missive: "Missive checked all our boxes. It was a huge relief to see we could maintain the shared inbox model—without building custom software from scratch."
Or Kason, from i-SOLIDS, who grew his sales team beyond himself:
We got to a point where we weren't providing the same level of communication, response, and service that allowed us to get to this point. We were relying on Outlook email and it was like 'are you responding to that or am I?'
And after a month with Missive, Kason recommends: "Don't think about just choosing a tool for today but this tool needs to work for scale too—that's a major decision factor."
Get a detailed walk through of how to configure Outlook to Missive, including terminology differences to get you acclimated to your new inbox.
Well like most things, it depends. If you're a team who lives in their inbox day and day out, and you're looking a collaboration-first inbox—we hope you'll give Missive a try.
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AI and email management go hand in hand.
There are AI tools dedicated to helping you clean your inbox (like SaneBox) and plenty that help you draft emails better and/or faster.
In a world where new AI tools are releasing every day, we're going to share some practical ways to use AI within email and your inbox.
At the end of each section, we'll cover some of the best AI email tools and AI assistants that can help you be more efficient in your inbox—whether you're a Gmail or Outlook user.
Here at Missive, our users get a lot of emails—100+ in a day in some cases. We crowdsourced the most practical, helpful AI suggestions that real businesses are using to maintain a clutter-free, productive inbox.
Before we jump into the examples, these are the three broad buckets where AI is used within inboxes:
For cleaning emails, there is usually a deep purging functionality (i.e., archive all emails before a certain date) as well as a new system to keep your inbox clean after the purge (i.e., auto-categorization into folders/labels). Clean Email is a great example of this bucket.
For drafting and writing emails, you can create prompts that take into consideration your writing style, structure, and tone and add in resources for AI to pull context from—most commonly, your knowledge base or website.
For kicking off other tasks—this is the most exciting part of AI within your inbox. Certain tools (like Missive's AI-powered rules) allow you to automate a set of actions based on the context of an email. Imagine every email gets assigned to the right people, a set of tasks is created, a label or folder is applied, and an entry is made in your CRM—without a single human interaction. That’s magic!
Let's get to the AI-powered magic.
We're highlighting Missive's AI-powered rules in the examples below, but you can create your own AI email automations with your favorite tools, and we include some recommendations.
Here are the 6 best AI email workflows.
Our inboxes get inundated every day, but not every email deserves equal attention. A clean inbox needs a system of categorization.
Historically, you could set up automations based on sender, message content, etc.—but now with AI, you can understand the context of emails, which changes email management entirely.
It's like having an AI assistant read each email and then categorize it based on the context within. It's far more robust than just looking at the sender domain.
If you don't already have some form of auto-labeling, auto-folder categorization, or archiving automation running, here are a few examples to get you started:
By auto-filing certain emails out of your inbox using AI, you'll be able to focus on the ones that need your attention. And when you have some free time, you can visit your newsletter label to catch up on industry insights.
Most modern email clients have some version of this built in. If you're looking for an add-on tool for Gmail or Outlook, we cover those below as well.
Missive — Inbox collaboration for teams
Superhuman — Great for keyboard shortcut lovers
Shortwave — For an AI-first inbox
SaneBox — AI email organizer that integrates with your existing client
Unroll.me — Alternative to SaneBox, bulk email cleaner for any provider
AI can save time inside your inbox—but using it to trigger external workflows is where the magic really happens.
Example: A real estate business receives emails from both buyers and sellers in a shared inbox. Their workflows are completely different, so we used AI to identify the intent and trigger specific assignments, tasks, and summaries for the right team members.
If you have different workflows depending on the email, you can use AI to detect the context and automate accordingly.
Relay.app — AI-first workflow builder
Zapier — Classic builder, now with AI
Missive — AI rules built into the collaborative inbox
Inbox maintenance is like pruning a tree—it requires regular attention.
With AI clients, workflow builders, or Missive rules, you can automatically clean up emails without manually clicking "unsubscribe."
Set it up narrowly (specific senders or domains) or broadly (based on open behavior, like emails unread for 30+ days).
Solutions like SaneBox include versions of this, though some manual training may be required.
Say you run an accounting firm where each client has a dedicated team and inbox.
Most messages are about invoices, but occasionally, an urgent email from the CEO arrives that needs management's attention.
AI can identify urgency and escalate the message automatically to the right person.
Other tools can do this too—but may require you to create specific folders/labels and rely on manual monitoring.
This works best if you have a large, public knowledge base or help center that the AI can reference. If you do, you can use one of the newer AI models that allow you to search the web.
Here's the prompt we use at Missive for our support team:
You are an expert customer support specialist for Missive, the collaborative team inbox platform. Your job is to draft accurate, empathetic, and clear replies to customer inquiries based only on official Missive documentation.
Note: Keep all responses strictly tied to Missive's documented functionality.
Now, if you want to get crazy with it. You can create an automation where a draft is created every time an incoming email fits a specific criteria. And you can use AI to help you determine which email triggers the automation.
Don't want to pay for contact enrichment tools? Use AI to summarize new prospects.
It adds context directly to the email thread, so you can start conversations better informed.
For more robust enrichment, tools like Clay or CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce offer AI-powered data collection.
We hope these ideas help you clean emails, draft faster, and automate smarter.
All the tools mentioned above offer a “fresh start” feature to deep clean your inbox and begin anew.
Whether you're using SaneBox with your current client or switching to an AI-first inbox—there's no reason your email shouldn’t flow to the right people and places automatically after setting a few AI-powered rules.
If you're looking for an AI-powered email client uniquely designed for teams—give Missive a try. No credit card needed, and our free trial includes access to AI rules.
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
Remember the first time you @mentioned a teammate below an email, instead of forwarding it to them?
That’s a magical moment for many Missive users.
It’s when they realized email can be collaborative without creating more email.
Starting today, with Guest Access, you can give that same experience to anyone you work with — even if they’re not on your team.
Guest Access makes it easy to bring people outside your organization — like an accountant, contractor, or client — directly into specific Missive conversations.
No more forwarding long threads. No more stitching together feedback from different tools. Just real-time chat alongside the emails that matter.
Here’s how it works:
Your guest will get an email with a link to join. Once they create a free Missive account, they’ll land directly in the conversation you invited them to.
They’ll be able to read the full message history and reply via chat — but not email, tasks, or assignments. Just focused, limited access.
Guest Access is included in all Missive plans. No add-ons. No hidden costs.
Each team member can invite up to 5 guests, and each guest can access up to 5 conversations.
That means if your team has 10 users, you can collaborate with up to 50 guests across 250 guest-enabled conversations — all for free.
We designed Guest Access for the people you don’t work with every day, but still need to collaborate with effectively — without paying for a full seat or dragging another tool into the mix.
If you’ve ever said:
I wish this person could just see this conversation—now they can.
Guest Access isn’t just for external vendors or partners. If you have teammates who don’t need full Missive functionality every day, Guest Access is a perfect lightweight option. No need to buy a full seat just to loop someone in occasionally.
By default, any team member can invite guests. But admins can manage this in:
Settings → Guests → Allow guest invitations
You can:
Want tighter control? You can restrict guest invitations so only admins or the org owner can send them. That way, access stays centralized and intentional.
Guests can:
Guests cannot:
This keeps their access simple, focused, and secure.
Admins can see which guests are active and what they have access to. If you need to invite new guests but hit your limit, you can quickly revoke access from inactive ones to free up slots.
We can’t wait to see how you use Guest Access.
Whether you’re looping in a freelance designer, a tax advisor, or just a teammate who doesn't need a full Missive seat — Guest Access gives you the power to collaborate where the conversation is happening.
Try it today and let us know what you think!
Can guests see the full history of the conversation?
Yes. Guests can view the entire message and chat history of any conversation they’re invited to.
Can guests reply to emails or send new ones?
No. Guests can only send chat messages. They cannot interact with the email side of the conversation.
Can guests be assigned to tasks or create tasks?
No. Guests don’t have access to task-related features in Missive.
Can guests @mention team members?
Yes. Guests can use @mentions in the chat area of the conversation to address specific people already present in the conversations. They can’t @mention people not present in the conversation.
What happens if I remove a guest from a conversation?
They will instantly lose access to that conversation and all its content.
Can I re-invite someone after removing them?
Absolutely. You can revoke access at any time and re-invite them later if needed.
Can I upgrade a guest to a full team member later?
Yes. If someone needs broader access, you can always add them as a regular user by assigning them a seat.
What if my guest has their own Missive organization?
They will be able to access the conversation(s) that you granted them, from their existing Missive interface. It will be treated like any other conversation.