Blog →
by
Luis Manjarrez
December 10, 2020
· Updated on
Missive was built with privacy in mind. It's a fundamental part of our business, as it should be for every company dealing with people's communications. Honesty and transparency are also at the core of our values.
The above sounds nice and all, but actions speak louder than words. That's why we have created this blog post to answer some of the most frequently asked questions regarding Missive's reliability, privacy and security practices.
To kick things off, a few key points:
You can consult our full privacy and security policies.
Good, now let's answer some questions!
Technically speaking, it would be false to claim we cannot read your emails. Missive imports your emails via IMAP like any email app does, and stores them in a database. This includes text content and attachments.
Storing this data in our own database is the technical foundation of a collaborative product like Missive. Thus, we naturally have access to the database that contains your emails in order to manage and maintain it in good shape for Missive to operate properly.
This is the same situation as with your main email provider (Gmail, Office 365, etc).
That said, only a few of our engineers have access to the database in question. Even for these people, getting to your actual email content is not trivial. We built internal tools that allow our engineers to do their daily job (eg. see what is going on in the system, number of emails processed, etc.) but none of these tools display email contents.
Needless to say, we are not in the business of scanning, sharing, or selling any of our users’ data. We never access a user’s data unless this user has specifically granted us permission and asked us to investigate a bug with their account, for instance.
No. Missive automatically blocks read trackers and 1x1 images to prevent senders from spying on what you do with their email. We currently block read trackers from these services.
Missive's servers are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). All our servers currently originate from the US East 1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS is used by companies and organizations such as Nasdaq, Netflix, the CDC, etc.
If you need a list of IP address ranges to whitelist on your server, you can use the following file provided by AWS:
https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json
Definitely not. We are completely bootstrapped, meaning we don't depend on investors' whims or decisions. We control 100% of our company and we've been in the market for over 5 years. We've been cash positive and profitable for some years now. We enjoy a healthy and growing monthly revenue rate.
There are over 1000 organizations using Missive, including big names like Pipedrive and Buffer.
As a pioneer and key player in the collaborative email space, it's safe to say we're in for the long run.
No. Never have, never will.
We don't even collect cookies or identifiable data points on our public website! Unlike most companies out there, who use this for website analytics and metrics. Not us.
Absolutely. As a GDPR-compliant company, you have the right to access, correct, export, and delete all personal data associated with your account.
To request any of the aforementioned actions, please contact us at privacy@missiveapp.com
Please know this action cannot be undone.
You will immediately be logged out of Missive with no means of logging back in.
Within 30 days, all traces of your Missive data and activity will be permanently deleted from our database, cloud storage, backups, and logs.
If you have any other questions regarding privacy, feel free to send us an email!
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.
March 13, 2025
Autopilot for Your Inbox with AI Rules
Revolutionize your inbox with Missive's AI Rules, where artificial intelligence meets your workflow to automatically sort, respond, and organize emails based on what they actually contain.
We've all been there. You open your inbox on Monday morning and face an avalanche of messages. Some need immediate attention. Others could wait. Many should be handled by different team members. And a surprising number don't need any response at all. While Missive's rule engine has always given you the flexibility to automate your workflow exactly how you want it, today we're taking that customization power to a whole new level.
What if your inbox could sort itself? What if it could understand what each email is about and take the right action automatically—all while you maintain complete control over how it behaves? What if you could define exactly how your emails are processed, based not just on who sent them, but on what they actually contain?
Today, we're launching AI Rules in Missive - a simple way to bring the intelligence of AI to your email workflow without the complexity. It's the same flexible rule engine you love, now with the power to understand email content the way you do.
AI Rules are an extension of Missive's existing rules engine. If you've used rules before, you know they're powerful for automating repetitive tasks based on simple conditions like sender address or subject line keywords.
Now, we're adding the ability to use AI to understand what an email is actually about.
Here's how it works:
No training data. No complicated setup. Just plain language instructions that the AI follows.
Let's look at some practical ways teams are already using AI Rules during our beta:
- A ⛑️ customer service team set up a rule that using this prompt:
Is this customer angry or upset? Respond with ONLY "YES" or "NO".
If the AI says YES, the email gets flagged as high priority and assigned to a senior agent.
- A 📈 sales team created a rule with this prompt:
Is this a qualified sales lead or just a general inquiry? Respond with ONLY ONE of these exact words: "sales lead" or "general inquiry".
Leads go straight to the sales pipeline, while general questions route to the support team. Their sales reps now spend more time selling and less time triaging emails.
- A ⚖️ legal firm uses AI to detect if an email contains a deadline or time-sensitive request.
Does this email contain a deadline, due date, or time-sensitive request? Respond with ONLY "YES" or "NO".
If it does, it gets tagged "Urgent" and triggers a notification and creates tasks. They haven't missed a filing deadline since.
The best part? These teams didn't need to become AI experts. They just wrote simple instructions in plain English.
One of the most powerful features of AI Rules is the ability to use the same prompt across multiple rules. This lets you create sophisticated email triage systems without duplicating your AI analysis costs.
For example, you could recreate Gmail's smart categories with more flexibility and control.
First, create a prompt that categorizes emails:
Analyze this email and respond with EXACTLY ONE of these categories:
"SOCIAL" - for messages from social networks, dating sites, etc.
"PROMOTIONS" - for marketing emails, offers, discounts, newsletters
"UPDATES" - for notifications, confirmations, receipts, statements
Then create separate rules, all using this exact same prompt but with different matching conditions:
The beauty of this approach is that the AI only analyzes each email once, even though you have six different rules. The result is cached and reused across all rules, making this both efficient and cost-effective.
And unlike Gmail's fixed categories, you have complete control over:
This is just one example of how you can use AI Rules to create a customized workflow that fits exactly how you and your team want to work.
We've built four powerful AI capabilities into Missive:
As shown above, use AI to analyze email content and make decisions. The AI can detect sentiment, identify request types, or extract specific information that would be difficult to capture with traditional keyword rules.
For example: "Is this customer angry?" or "Does this email contain a deadline?"
Have the AI create a helpful note about an email. The AI can summarize long threads, extract key points, translate emails or provide context for your team.
e.g.
Translate the email to English.
Let the AI identify action items in emails and automatically create tasks. No more manually creating to-dos from your messages. For example:
Extract any tasks or action items from this email and create a task for each one.
Automatically create response drafts for common inquiries. The AI can craft a personalized reply based on the email content, which you can review and send with a click:
Create a helpful response to this customer inquiry about our pricing plans.
The above draft example could be paired with an AI condition that makes sure the email is about billing!
We've worked hard to make AI Rules approachable. You don't need to be a prompt engineer or AI expert to get value from day one. The system uses gpt-4o-mini
, which offers an excellent balance of speed, cost-effectiveness, and quality for email processing.
We understand that email contains sensitive information. That's why:
For years, we've been building tools to help teams manage email more efficiently. Rules have always been at the heart of that mission - letting you automate the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the work that matters.
AI Rules take that automation to a new level. Now your inbox doesn't just sort emails based on simple patterns - it understands what they're about and what needs to happen next.
This isn't about replacing human judgment. It's about removing the tedious parts of email management so your team can focus on what humans do best: building relationships, solving complex problems, and delivering value to your customers.
AI Rules are available today for all Missive users on the Productive plan and above. Give them a try, and let us know what you think.
Your inbox will thank you.
Want to learn more about AI Rules? Check out these helpful resources: