Here’s the Deal

Mail.app vs Canary Mail

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When comparing Mail.app vs Canary Mail, the Slant community recommends Mail.app for most people. In the question“What are the best e-mail clients for macOS?” Mail.app is ranked 3rd while Canary Mail is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Mail.app is:

One thing Apple does well is to integrate its apps and hardware. The mail app is no exception. If you must be in the hermit kingdom, at least take advantage of the (often excellent) features provided.

Specs

Exchange SupportYes

PlatformsMacOS

SearchYes

ExchangeYes

IMAPYes

Multiple AccountsYes

POP3Yes

Exchange SupportIMAP only

PlatformsMacOS, iOS

SearchYes

Encryption methodsPGP, Auto

End-to-end encryptionYes

IntegrationsGoogle Drive, Dropbox, iCal, Google Calendar, iCloud, Things, Todoist, Keybase, MIT

Push NotificationsYes

Snooze EmailsYes

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best e-mail clients for macOS?

Pros

Pro
Integration (with other Apps/Hardware)

Pro
Will probably be enough for a sizable chunk of users

Since it's the built-in Mac email client and is quite complete feature-wise, most users will not really need any other third-party applications out there. Mail.app should be enough for their needs.

Pro
Easily annotate pictures or sign documents inside the client itself

Mail.app has powerful markup tools which let users add annotations to images or even sign documents they got through email without ever leaving the client.

Pro
Smart folders on steroids

You can choose out of tenths of mailheaders (several hundreds including virtual headers)
"<header> is (not) in <folder> <header>" operator which enables you to do cool filters
Each smart folder can have smart subfolders by an user definable key

Pro
Shows threaded view with snippets in middle panel

Pro
Can be easily extended

If the basic features inside Mail.app are not enough, it can easily be extended through plugins to add new features.

Pro
Multiple Signatures for Multiple Accounts including ALIASES

You can assign your default signature to an ALIAS for the same account or create an altogether new one.

Pro
No personal data stored on servers

No access tokens, passwords, attachments or email itself is stored on Canary servers.

Pro
Seamlessly integrates with iOS verion

Gone are the days of manual setup of phone email clients! Canary Mail syncs not just your accounts but all of your settings and even signatures on iCloud.

Pro
Local email database is encrypted on disk

Canary stores your local email database encrypted.

Pro
Gorgeous and intuitive

Pro
Pretty Good Privacy or PGP built-in

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Cons

Con
No option to snooze emails

You can not snooze emails to view later. This makes it hard to keep the inbox clean at all times since you have to read every email and choose to delete or keep them the moment they arrive to do so.

Con
Missing lots of advanced features

Out of the box, Mail.app may not have as many features as some other options. This can be mitigated with plugins though. But that is not a perfect solution since third-party plugins may not be very reliable in the long run.

Con
Really bad reliability

Database engine gets stuck consuming 100% of one core; crashes; a 40GB log file has been spotted.

Con
Updates may break plugins

Apple is known to make API changes to Mail.app when updating which break a lot of plugins.

This can be very annoying for users whose workflow heavily relies on plugins, since they have to wait for plugin developers to make the changes needed to fix any issues brought by the update.

Con
Poor performance for some users on El Capitan

Con
Ugly

Con
Poor calendar integration in exchange mode

Con
Missing mainstream features

No functionality for user-defined Gmail message-tagging, or moving/copying to IMAP folders. Might be acceptable in a free app, but not in one with premium pricing.