Andrew Orr
Microsoft has recently decided to make its Outlook email app free for Mac users in the App Store and will add new features.
The Outlook app no longer requires a Microsoft 365 subscription or an Office license, Microsoft announced on Monday.
Outlook for Mac is now Apple Silicon native, and includes support for Outlook.com accounts, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and other email providers that support IMAP. The app is also optimized for Macs with Apple Silicon and supports Handoff so that iOS users can resume work they started on their Mac.
Other features of Outlook for Mac include a widget for calendar entries, native notification support, and a menu bar "peek" option to view calendar entries within the app quickly. Microsoft also plans to support Focus Mode in the future, which lets Apple users create profiles and fine-tune notifications and other aspects of their devices.
An upcoming menu bar peek featureThe Outlook Profiles will help prevent unwanted notifications at the wrong time so users can stay focused on important emails. Moreover, Outlook offers extra choices for prominently displaying critical emails.
With a Focused inbox, the app automatically sorts important emails from unimportant ones so users can find them with a toggle above the message list. Users can pin messages to keep them at the top or snooze non-urgent ones for later, with further options for categories, flagging, and adding frequently-used folders to the Favorites section.
Outlook for Mac is available from the Mac App Store as a 974MB download. It requires macOS 11 Big Sur or a newer operating system.
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36 Comments
Could it be because users don’t want a crappy cross platform web app. Next: paying users to use it.
Um yeah free is still too much. If you measure lost time and frustration from bloatware, you realize quickly how expensive MSOFT products are at any price. 1 gig for a mail app ought to give you an idea of just how bloated and full of spyware and other cruft it is...
Apple mail and fantastical.
Wow. That's like 100 years later and it's finally free. Outlook is the standard mail app for corporate users. To be honest I find it more robust than Apple Mail but I prefer separate it as work mail app and use Apple Mail as personal mail app. If I run a business, Outlook is the one.