After Wandering the Desert, I Found My Way Home to Outlook
Techstrong IT, Thursday, July 23rd, 2026
An email power user returns to Outlook for Mac after years of testing alternatives that buckled under volume.
Alan Shimel, managing four Gmail accounts plus a Microsoft account with over 1,000 daily emails, tested numerous AI-era email applications including Spark Desktop and Canary.
Most alternatives consumed excessive memory and crashed under his workload. After years of using browser tabs instead, he returned to Outlook for Mac and found it does not blink at multiple accounts and deep archives.
The integrated Copilot and calendar functions proved genuinely useful rather than decorative, illustrating that established products sometimes need time to become what users originally wanted.