I like K9 mail as a lightweight, fast, and simple email client, but it has a few major shortcomings for use on Chromebooks:
1) It doesn’t scale well to a tablet or laptop screen, and Users can’t chose fonts or more than a couple font sizes. On a Full HD laptop screen, it is not possible to get the text large enough to read messages easily. It badly needs an option for users to specify font sizes for messages.
2) One can’t cut or paste text (like phone numbers, addresses etc.) into or out of a K9 email msg. Very annoying.

Outlook.com –
This is a useful client, with great formatting options when composing email. A few things I despise about it however are:
1) The Contacts folder can’t be synchronized with Google Contacts (there are several 3rd party apps that claim to do this, but none works worth a darn). Not being able to use one’s Google contacts when on a Chromebook is a significant issue — took me hours to do a one-time migration to the Outlook.com “people” folder, but it gets outdated quickly.

2) To use outlook.com, you must sign up for a Microsoft account – which is OK as it gives you access to many things from Microsoft. However, when you’re working with this email client for multiple accounts, your “FROM” address defaults to the microsoft account email for any new messages. The user CAN’T change to a different “default” FROM address, so you’ve got to remember to manually change the FROM address for EACH new email you send.

3) outlook.com is quite slow to sync with external email accounts, making it un-usable for those two-factor-authentication emails that give you only 3-5 minutes to enter verification info sent when you’re trying to log-in somewhere.

SPARK & EDISON MAIL – Non-starters from a security standpoint as they house and read all of your email on their servers in order to add their “smart mail” functions.

Yes, failed to address the real issue, most people have multiple mail accounts across various providers, not just one. How is this hard to grasp when offering advice on email clients.

Interesting read, but add me to the list of people looking for a decent email client for ChromeOS. Actually, scratch that, not a decent email client, *any* email client!!

The two you mention are the Gmail one that has been discontinued, and the Outlook one which I don’t really understand as all it does when I find it in the Chrome Web Store is send me to the web page! I have a GMail account for my personal mail and 4 exchange accounts for work. I have been using Android apps (currently Android) which work but are clunky – the biggest problem for me is attaching files – as they’re Android if you try to attach they just show you the root of the Chromebook which is useless as mine (Asus C302) won’t let you save files to root! I end up using a 3rd party file manager to copy files from SD card/Google Drive to a temp directory on root so that I can attach them in an Android app! Maybe I’m being daft but it’s hardly niche – an email account that allows you to attach files!

It’s such a shame as Chrome OS is a good platform for web/email/videos/productivity but with some silly flaws that could easily be fixed…

Came across your post, and like “Guest1,” I’m searching for a tool that can manage multiple inboxes across multiple providers (e.g. “Work EMail” and “Personal EMail”). Thunderbird does this perfectly but doesn’t run on Chromebook. Need the ability to drag/drop between multiple email providers (“someone sent this to my personal, should be in my work!” kind of thing).

Hey there,

My apologies if this post didn’t deliver. I was doing a roundup of email apps that I think would benefit a wide scope of people and a variety of uses. Had no idea that there were so many readers looking for such a specific email client.

I’ll try to find one that’s compatible with ChromeOS and give it a shot. If it’s good enough, I’ll add it to this list if there’s one out there!

Thanks for the thoughts.

Agreed, thought this article was to provide some insight into an email client that can handle multiple email accounts at the same time, but this article just left disappointed.