Outlook made my electronic mail horrible. This free Home windows 11 app fastened it

Previously, I’ve written about my dislike of Microsoft’s propensity to inject net tech into the Home windows 11 shell. For as handy as Edge WebView 2 (net app elements) might be from an engineering flexibility and replace cadence standpoint, they’re much less performant, much less visually pleasing, and extra resource-hungry when in comparison with their native UI factor counterparts.

For essentially the most half, apps and UI surfaces that make use of WebView2 merely render commonplace Chromium web site parts inside a wrapper, versus rendering them utilizing native UI strategies, frameworks, and elements. Because of this, responsiveness and scalability take a success, contact optimizations develop into an afterthought, visuals develop into a mishmash of design language rules, and background reminiscence utilization skyrockets since brower-based background processes must boot up from sleep.

Windows 11 is downright saturated with WebView2. The tech might be discovered injected inside the Widgets Board, Home windows Search, the Copilot app, Sticky Notes, the Picture app’s picture editor, and even the in-box video editor often known as Clipchamp. Whereas Microsoft has been slowly working on a brand new, native Widgets Board expertise to switch the present web-based model, the upcoming web-based agenda view characteristic inside Home windows’ calendar flyout is proof alone that the corporate has no intention of reversing course.

Maybe most egregious of all is Microsoft’s decision to pull the plug on its stable Mail, Calendar, and Individuals functions for Home windows, which it did on the very finish of 2024. These apps have been constructed on the native Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app framework, having benefited from a lot of enhancements and enhancements relationship all the best way again to Home windows 8’s launch in 2012. Mail, Calendar, and Individuals have been fashionable apps that took benefit of the Home windows platform in each sense of the phrase, with containerization, scalability, full-blown contact and gesture management implementation, and different fashionable niceties.

Sadly, Microsoft determined that PC customers cannot have something good on this world, and so it changed these aforementioned apps with a brand new, consolidated Outlook app that’s basically the Outlook.com web site wrapped inside an app window and masquerading as a local app. So as to add salt to this wound, experiences point out that the company plans to deprecate the basic Win32 Outlook consumer that ships as a part of Microsoft Copilot 365 (previously Workplace 365) for Home windows. In a head-scratching transfer, Mac customers are set to proceed to reap the advantages of a well-designed (and native) Outlook app of their very own.

For sure, this state of affairs is a foul one for the Home windows platform as a complete, and I am actually not the one one complaining. Productiveness — together with electronic mail, calendar, and make contact with administration — is tightly woven into Microsoft’s DNA, and so it is alarming to see the corporate’s flagship OS ship with a substandard out-of-box Outlook expertise. Merely put, the brand new Outlook is sluggish, clunky, visually messy, and close to unattainable to make use of comfortably in pill mode.

E mail on Home windows 11 finished proper

Wino Mail is every little thing Outlook for PC ought to be and extra

Enter Wino Mail: a free and open-source electronic mail consumer different for Home windows 11 that basically serves as a forked clone model of the unique Microsoft-built Mail app. Upgraded to help fashionable WinUI3 framework and Fluent Design 2 rules with a visually interesting Mica material floor, I regard Wino because the non secular successor to Mail et al. for the Home windows 11 period.

“I am a giant fan of Home windows Mail & Calendars as a consequence of its simplicity. Personally, I discover it extra intuitive for day by day use instances in comparison with Outlook desktop and the brand new WebView2 powered Outlook model. Seeing Microsoft deprecate it dragged me into beginning to work on Wino a few years in the past. Wino’s principal motivation is to carry all the present performance from Mail & Calendars over time with out altering the consumer expertise that thousands and thousands have beloved for the reason that Home windows 8 days in Mail & Calendars,” writes the developer on GitHub.

The Wino app itself is extremely speedy and secure, in my expertise, with it all the time delivering emails instantly, together with when all lively home windows are closed. The principle app interface is accessible from the system tray when minimized, and it consumes little in the best way of background sources. Better of all, Wino Mail is tailored for contact, with built-in gestures for swiping to refresh inboxes and deleting emails.

After all, being a smaller-scale challenge, Wino Mail is not jam-packed with all of the full-fat desktop Outlook energy customers options that some would possibly hope to see, however the former’s simplicity and zippiness greater than makes up for this in my eyes. To be honest, there are a great variety of personalization choices on deck right here, with choices to regulate the theme, accent colours, spacing, panel size, default mailbox on launch, and extra.

Wino Mail is suitable with Microsoft Reside Accounts (MSN, Hotmail, Reside, Outlook), as nicely Gmail, IMAP, and SMTO mail accounts. You are ready so as to add three separate electronic mail addresses to the app at any given time, although including additional simultaneous accounts is locked behind a paywall. Even with out paying, the baseline expertise is nice to the purpose the place I truthfully by no means need to use one other electronic mail consumer for Home windows 11 ever once more. So far as fashionable PC apps go, Wino Mail sits among the very best of the genre.