Email and Calendar

Email and Calendar

I have two personal email accounts, and three work email accounts and managing them was proving hard. One of the reasons I decided to switch back to a Mac as an experiment was email and calendar. Before switching I tried multiple solutions.

Linux only really has Thunderbird as a viable alternative to Outlook. Thunderbird can handle multiple email accounts and their associated calendars. However, it can’t handle O365 accounts effectively without getting a third party plugin and it has a terrible user experience.

Despite its perceived capabilities Outlook on Windows starts breaking down with a lot of accounts. The calendar in particular doesn’t play well with multiple google email accounts.

I even tried Superhuman, but their focus is all about email efficiency vs calendaring, and wasn’t important to them.

Apple’s Mail app and Calendar app, which are consumer applications first are surprisingly capable. They’ve proven to be the best option which really surprised me. I still haven’t found a solution that can sync multiple work accounts and place blocks when one work account has a meeting, to prevent double booking. I should investigate Zapier or IFTT based solutions. On the Calendar app you can duplicate an event, and then change it’s calendar which has proven to be the easiest work around.

Well done Apple.