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by
Holly Stanley
December 4, 2023
· Updated on
July 15, 2025
It’s Monday 9 AM. You have a coffee in hand, ready to tackle the day. You open your laptop and bam! Your inbox looks like it threw a wild party over the weekend.
There you are, navigating the sea of emails, replying, deleting, flagging––the whole shebang. Before you know it, it's lunchtime, and you're wondering, ‘Where did half my day just go?’
Welcome to the world of email overload, where spending hours on emails feels like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
But here's the kicker––email doesn't have to be the black hole of your workday. With a few smart strategies, you can turn the tide and have enough time left for your most important tasks.
In this article, we’ll share how you can reclaim your time from the clutches of the relentless inbox.
The average time to write an email is around five minutes. This time depends on factors including the email's complexity and the writer's skill. The purpose of the email, the need for research, and the level of detail required also influence the time taken.
Research by OnePoll and Slack shows that the average employee drafts an average of 112 emails a week, spending just over five-and-a-half minutes on each. That amounts to around eleven hours a week writing work emails.
The average person spends just under two hours per day checking and responding to emails. That's a big chunk of the workday. It's surprising how quickly those quick email checks add up, turning into a significant part of our daily routine.
According to a study from Microsoft, office workers can spend up to 8.8 hours a week on email, or just under two hours per day. Imagine two hours––that's like watching a movie or cooking a fancy dinner! And it's not just typing out responses; it involves sorting through the inbox, reading through email threads, and sometimes, getting lost in the email rabbit hole. This number can even shoot up for those in roles heavy on communication or management.
Ever wondered why some long emails take just a minute to whip up, while other shorter emails have you staring at your screen for an eternity? It turns out, the time it takes to craft that perfect email isn't just about your typing speed or email length.
From the complexity of your message to who's on the receiving end, a variety of elements come into play:
The secret to breaking free from the endless cycle of send and receive lies in a few clever strategies. You need to work smarter, not harder when managing your digital correspondence.
Here are six tips to make email work for you, not against you.
Ah, the ping of an inbox notification––it’s irresistible. But you don't have to be at its beck and call. Imagine if you checked your mailbox on the street every five minutes; it would be excessive, but that's what constant email checking is like.
So here's what I do:
I set specific times for diving into my emails. Once in the morning, post-lunch, and an hour before I call it a day. It's like having appointments with my inbox.
This way, I'm not a slave to every ‘ping’ and can focus on my work.
As a result, my productivity shot up, and the world didn't end because I didn't reply to an email in nanoseconds. So give it a try––schedule mini-email dates, and you may find yourself getting more done (and maybe even enjoying a peaceful coffee without the constant pings).
Have you ever felt like you're typing the same email for the millionth time? It's like déjà vu but with your keyboard. My lifesavers are templates and canned responses. I used to spend ages crafting responses to the usual ‘Can you send me the report?’ or ‘What's the status of our project?’
Then, a friend introduced me to the magic of email templates. It was like finding a secret shortcut in a maze. Now, I have several pre-written responses for these common queries. It's like having a personal assistant who knows exactly what to say. Just a couple of clicks, and voilà, the email is done.
Insert a response by typing the # character anywhere in the draft.
Ever feel like every email is shouting ‘urgent’ at you? I used to think the same until I realized it's all about prioritizing. Not all emails are born equal.
Sorting emails is similar to creating a VIP list for a party. The high-priority ones–– urgent client queries – they're on the A-list and get the first pass. The less critical messages, like email newsletters and FYI emails, they're like party crashers; they can wait. This way, I tackle the urgent messages first and don't get bogged down by the small fry.
My email secret weapons are tools and extensions. I used to think I could manage my inbox with sheer willpower. Spoiler alert: I couldn't. But then, I discovered these little helpers.
Take the Missive app, for instance. It's like having a super assistant for your email. You can snooze emails (so they pop back up when you're ready to deal with them), block read trackers, create and save canned responses, and even collaborate with your team in the app. It's like turning your inbox into mission control.
Need more convincing? Sarah Hum, the co-founder of the feedback management tool Canny, says:
Missive helps our team make sure emails are handled quickly and effortlessly.
AI integrations can be a game changer in improving your email workflow. The AI understands the context of your conversation and suggests relevant replies, making you an email speed demon.
Translating emails can feel like a chore. Well, not anymore. Missive's AI integration can translate messages, so you're basically a multilingual wizard now without the hassle of toggling between email and translation apps.
The best part is it’s customizable. You can use the ‘Prompt’ feature to guide the AI, making your emails spot-on every time. Plus, setting it up is a breeze––just get an OpenAI account, generate an API key, and you're set to integrate AI into your Missive experience.
You can save your most-used prompts, making repetitive tasks a walk in the park. So, whether it's fixing grammar, changing the tone, or even translating––it's all at your fingertips. The AI assistant can also craft custom email replies automatically based on your saved canned responses.
Ever felt like you're on a never-ending scavenger hunt trying to find that one important email buried under a mountain of others? Well, filters and folders are your treasure map. I started using them, and it's like night and day. Setting up filters is like having a personal assistant who knows exactly where everything should go.
I remember the time I was looking for an urgent contract email amidst a sea of newsletters. I was searching for the word ‘contract’ in the subject line, and it was like finding a needle in a haystack. But then, I created a ‘Contracts’ folder and set up a filter to send all contract-related emails there. The next time I needed one, it was right there waiting for me, no digging required.
Labels are similar to post-it notes for your emails. Label it, and you'll find it in a second.
Taming your inbox isn’t a pipe dream, it’s totally doable. With the right tools and know-how, incoming emails won’t take over your workday. It’s simply a case of setting dedicated times for email checks, using AI-powered email tools, and creating an organized filters and labels system.
So don’t be another employee slogging through 2 hours of daily inbox management. Instead, take advantage of an email tool and optimize your inbox management using the strategies we explored. You’ll then have more time for your most important tasks.
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.