If you want a separate app for email but still want to use the Gmail web interface, look at Mailplane which offers that, plus the ability to use multiple Gmail accounts. Most of Gmail’s features work best if you are using the web interface for Gmail, so I would encourage you to consider using that. Do you have to use Mail.app?Īsk any developer who has worked on an email app, and they will tell you that supporting Gmail is the bane of their existence, because Gmail uses its own protocol for email which is sort of like the standard email protocol (IMAP) yet very different in some important ways from standard email.Īlthough most Mac users are familiar with Mail.app, I think it is not the best way to use Gmail on the Mac.

For the sake of simplicity I will refer to “” whenever I mean “the web interface for your Gmail account”. For example, to check my MacStories email, I can go to. You can log in to your Gmail account either by going to or by going to a special URL using your domain. This is commonly referred to as “Google Apps” (sometimes “Google Apps for Business” or “Google Apps for Work” or “Google Apps for Education” etc).įor the sake of clarity and brevity, I will just refer to “Gmail” for “Email which is provided by Google, regardless of whether it is provided by your school, company, organization, or or any of the other country-specific Gmail domains.” Many businesses and schools use Google’s mail service for their email, even with their own domain names. The good news is that although Apple’s Mail.app and Gmail have had a rocky relationship in the past, Mail.app in Yosemite works pretty well with Gmail, but there are some things that you should understand before you proceed. My friend Amy is having her first experience with using Gmail, and, it, um, isn’t going as well as she’d like.

Mac set default email to gmail