The best mail app for Windows… is Mail!
Your answer to Craig McAlistair in MF291 didn’t make sense! Craig wanted to use an email client which would give him the features of Apple Mail on a Windows PC.
Your answer was to suggest Inky and Thunderbird. Haven’t you missed the obvious answer? Surely Craig should simply use Mail on his PC via iCloud? I do exactly that. I use a MacBook Air at home and a Windows PC at work and I access my Apple Mail on the PC through iCloud. It works exactly the same as Mail on the Mac. No brainer. Julian Brown
Good point. iCloud does indeed provide a web interface that is very similar to the desktop Mail app. It’s not a perfect replacement though. One minor point is that because you are accessing your mail through the browser, you need to remember to keep that tab or window separate from the others. If you normally work with many tabs, perhaps grouped into different windows, it’s a nuisance to keep track of where your email has got to, and you can end up accidentally closing it. With Safari 9, you can overcome this by pinning open iCloud.com.
More importantly, iCloud’s web interface only lets you access your iCloud account. If you have a Gmail address, say, a desktop app would let you access that as well as your iCloud mail in a unified inbox. The web app can’t do that; you’d have to set Gmail to forward to iCloud.
These problems aren’t insurmountable, but email is normally an important part of the daily workflow, and even a small speck of grit can chafe quite badly if you’re rubbing up against it dozens of times a day. For me at least, webmail interfaces are a handy alternative, much like being able to read email on my phone is, but they are no substitute for a desktop app that I’m comfortable with.