Microsoft makes Outlook for Mac free, no Workplace or Microsoft 365 required

Microsoft is making the Outlook for Mac app free to make use of, the corporate introduced this week. Beforehand accessible with a Microsoft 365 account or as a part of the Workplace for Mac app suite, the Outlook app is downloadable from the Mac App Retailer and works with Outlook.com, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and plain outdated IMAP and POP electronic mail accounts.

Microsoft already provides a free model of the Outlook shopper for iOS and Android, and it is at the moment testing a preview of a redesigned Outlook app that can change the built-in Mail and Calendar apps that ship with Home windows 11.

The Mac model of the app does not use that new design—it is the identical Outlook for Mac app that Microsoft rolled out again in late 2020—however the firm’s weblog publish says the corporate is engaged on “rebuilding Outlook for Mac from the bottom up.” It will presumably be the identical shopper that Microsoft is testing in Home windows, a part of the corporate’s “One Outlook” challenge (additionally known as Undertaking Monarch) that goals to supply a single unified mail shopper that appears and works the identical means throughout all supported platforms.

A part of that One Outlook challenge means making all electronic mail accounts look and act the identical means in Outlook, and to make that occur, the Outlook app goes a bit additional than most mail purchasers when syncing with third-party electronic mail suppliers. If you use non-Microsoft IMAP electronic mail accounts like Gmail within the Outlook for Mac app, Microsoft will constantly sync emails, calendar appointments, and contacts to its personal servers, successfully sustaining a second copy of all the information that is already being saved by your electronic mail supplier.

If nothing else, the brand new Outlook for Mac is a welcome different to Apple’s built-in Mail and Calendar apps, which work mainly high-quality more often than not however enhance little or no between macOS releases. Outlook for Mac will run on macOS 11.0 (Massive Sur) or later, and like most of Microsoft’s apps lately, it is a Common app binary that runs natively on each Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. It additionally helps Handoff options when utilizing the iOS model of Outlook on a telephone that is signed in to the identical iCloud account as your Mac.