Sparrow provides a version of Outlook for Gmail users

Will Brinson

Screen shot 2011 02 14 at 10.05.06 AM 309x173 Sparrow provides a version of Outlook for Gmail usersMy mom has a “Northstate.net” account, I know lots of people who won’t let Aol just freaking die already and Hotmail still exists, apparently. But everyone pretty much agrees that if you’re going to fire up a personal email account, it’s Gmail or GTFO, right? (Hopefully it is. God save you if you still think Aol’s the best option on the web.)

In that vein, let’s talk about Sparrow, an application for Mac users (sorry, PC folks) that replicates the principles of Outlook. Yes, Outlook — that dreaded whore of non-threaded emails and many other evil vestiges of desktop email.

For starters, it’s only $9.99 (and, in full disclosure, the Sparrow folks were kind enough to comp me a review copy) and, like any app — and Outlook — it runs in the background.

This means, if you’re a Gmail user, you no longer need to actually have your browser open to have an email program running.

I’m not confident I’ll end up switching over to Sparrow completely — because I blog for a living, I utilize Gchat a tremendous amount during the day, and I prefer using it in the window as opposed to iChat, etc.

That being said, there’s a ton to like.

For starters, you can import multiple email addresses into the Sparrow program. And, for each of those email address, you can create multiple aliases. This is awesome because I can send something “from” my Guyism account without ever jumping out of my native Gmail client and/or address. (Although I’ve tried running it from my second Gmail address and didn’t have success with masking the sending address.)

There’s a pile of additional Gmail features incorporated, most notably labels. If you get anything resembling a high volume of inbox activity and don’t use labels, well, I’m not even mad. I’m amazed.

Enabling Gmail shortcuts — a lot of people love this, but I don’t use them — is an option in settings as well.

And, of course, stars, which are ridiculously important if you’re a person who gets a ton of emails and likes to save stuff as part of an inbox “to-do list” without having 5,000 unread emails.

Best of all, though? THREADS. Sweet, glorious, threads. Just thinking about what would happen to my life without threads makes my stomach queasy, and, thankfully, Sparrow calms my mind by bringing in threaded action to a desktop email client.

One downside of the threaded convos is that it doesn’t split up enormous threads the way normal Gmail does — after 100 back-and-forths, Gmail dumps into a new thread (for the sake of load time). Sparrow condensed a 604 -email between my friends and I (it’s an NC State thread, we’re about to be balls deep in a coaching change and people are fired up) and caused a serious lag time on bringing that particular thread up. Regular Gmal has it split up into six different emails.

There’s also a slight delay in sending and receiving sometimes, but it’s pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things, especially if you’re someone who doesn’t obsessively check your email.

Labs is out the window too, and that means no “Priority Inbox” (which is probably the biggest reason I’d never make the jump) or any of the special features offered, like “Did You Mean” and the sometimes life-saving “Unsend” button.

Anyway, if you’re someone who really likes your Gmail account but would prefer to operate it in something other your browser, it’s totally worth the $10 to download and is — easily — the best Mac mail client I’ve seen.

To convince you more, I planned on screenshotting a bunch of different emails, but realized blurring out all the different addresses would be a pain in the ass (plus, you’d probably end up seeing my low account balance or something). So, just watch the Sparrow preview vid instead:

Sparrow – The new mail for Mac from domleca on Vimeo.

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