Sparrow Review

After emerging out of its beta version, Sparrow has become a full featured, powerful mail client with beautiful minimalistic interface which you will love at first sight. It supports all major mail providers with their IMAP such as Gmail, Hotmail Mail, MobileMe, AOL and with custom IMAP servers. And it support POP too.

Design

The design of Sparrow app is similar to a Twitter client named Tweetie. If you would like to switch from your Mac Mail app, you will be surprised at first with its simplicity and look. It seems that, the Mail app for the iPad was the developers’ source of inspiration too. The overall design of the app is excellent and you will love to use it. The developer has given lots of attention to many little things, such as the way the message closes, animation, and glowing icons when you take the cursor over them and even on selection of messages. This application is the most beautiful mail app on the Mac. The design is great.

Functionality

The interface is minimalistic. It has a three columns layout design, which the third is collapsible. In the left hand side pane, the mailboxes are shown and can be customized with images. When you click the image, it will expand and show all the messages in that mailbox.

Once expanded you will be able to view your starred, sent, drafts, and trash boxes. Like Mac Mail app, there is an instant search bar to filter the messages on top.

It will notify if you have new mail and those that are unread by displaying on the menu bar icon. In the inbox, the subject and a few lines of the message will be displayed. In the third column, you can view your selected message. You can see the time and day of the message.

Sparrow has full support for Gmail features like labels and it does sync with Gmail labels. The labels can be viewed by clicking on an icon at the bottom left-hand corner of the inbox window. It is the place where you can see all of your spam messages.

Attachments support drag and drop, so that you can do it easily by simply dragging on your message. The normal method of select and add is also supported by Sparrow. It has a very cool feature, threaded message. It is shown in Sparrow in a very beautiful way. You will see a stack of message headers on top of each other. Click and it will show you the content. It has a quick reply button that converts to a text box so that you can reply and send.

MacReview.com Verdict:

If you are tired of trying out many email clients in the past, you will be satisfied with the design, functionality, and features of Sparrow. If you are using the default Mail app or Mailplane and fed up with them, Sparrow is here to rescue you.