14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 10 ships with a pre-loaded Mail app whose purpose is to serve as a native email client, technically rendering apps like Mozilla Thunderbird and Outlook pretty much useless.
Mail has received a lot of updates in all these years since the debut of Windows 10, but as a heavy user, I still feel that this apps leaves a lot to be desired as far as the comparison with a fully-featured email client goes.
And I’m not talking just about its functionality, as Microsoft has already added the basic feature package, but about the everyday experience that you get when using the app.
One of the biggest issues with the Mail app is its lack of consistency. Despite your settings, the app sometimes forgets to check the email, so there’s a chance that you end up receiving messages at a later time. I used Mail with an Exchange account and I configured it to download emails “as items arrive.” And yet, sometimes they arrive at the right time, while every now and then it fails to check for new messages and ends up downloading emails with a delay of a few minutes.
Running the Mail app side by side with Mozilla Thunderbird easily highlights these problems, as Mozilla’s client works flawlessly every time it has to download new emails.
Furthermore, manually checking for updates in the Mail app sometimes doesn’t make any difference, as it keeps telling you there’s no new email when, in fact, there is. Only that it downloads it a few minutes later.
The built-in Windows 10 email client also comes with a badge counter which displays how many unread messages you have in your inbox. However, as I complained in the past on several occasions, this counter sometimes tells me I have one unread message, but when opening the app, there’s no new email in there.
More recently, Microsoft has added an ad in the Mail app, making the experience overall much worse.
Basically, the company recommends Windows 10 users to download the Outlook mobile app for Android and iOS, and it does this with a banner placed in the sidebar of the Mail app. While having an ad in a free email app is frustrating, to say the least, the ad isn’t even removed if you install the Outlook mobile app. I have the same mail account configured in Outlook on my iPhone and the ad is still there in Mail on my Windows 10 device.
Don’t get me wrong, the Mail app overall is a nice effort, and it’s good to see that Windows 10 finally comes with a native email client. However, as compared to Mozilla Thunderbird or even Microsoft’s Outlook, it lacks too much in terms of functionality, so there’s a chance the majority of power users would stick with a different app going forward.
I stopped using Mail in Windows 10 and returned to Outlook a few months ago simply because I want my mails to arrive on time. The ad, however, is driving lots of users to other apps, including here Thunderbird, and unless Microsoft removes it in a future update, there’s a chance the userbase would keep shrinking – as a matter of fact, Microsoft says you can’t remove the ad, suggesting that it’s not considering pulling it at some point in the future.
In the meantime, there are lots of worthy email clients out there that come with so many more features that Windows 10’s Mail app. Hopefully, Microsoft will have a look at all of these and keep improving its client to make it a better choice for both beginners and power users.