A recent surge of worthy new email clients offers Mac users some of the best choices they’ve ever had for managing their mail. With a panoply of clever features and new ideas, these contenders have also mounted a serious challenge to the relatively stagnant Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook. But with so may options to choose from, it’s now even harder to pick out the best email client for your particular needs. We’ve found one strong program that offers a great mix of features, usability, and value for a broad swath of users, plus several more that will cater well to more specialized preferences.

Here are our picks for the best email clients for PC and Mac OS X, whether you’re willing to pay a premium price or, well, not. Attachments, links, tracking numbers, and a slew of other data. Support for the major email providers is also crucial for success and widespread adoption among users. The recent rise in the number of feature rich email clients for Mac allows users to select the best among clients that suit their taste and requirements. For Tracking Projects: Toggl (Free or $5/user/month) If you’re a freelancer, you need to keep track of how much time you’re spending on various projects for billing purposes. If you want a no-nonsense tool for doing that with all kinds of reporting features, I recommend checking out Toggl first.

Top choice: Postbox 3 ( ) isn’t the newest or sleekest candidate in this roundup. Its design hews more closely to the traditional Mac look and feel, rather than adopting a slick iOS-like appearance. But for $10, it combines reliable performance, smart design, and a wide array of impressive features that make the program feel like what Apple Mail ought to be. Even though it’s built on Mozilla’s aging Thunderbird underpinnings, Postbox handled my email quickly and confidently. Setting up new POP and IMAP accounts went smoothly; in one case, when I tried to set up a work Outlook account, Postbox patiently guessed at several different IMAP configurations until it found the right one. It then filled up my new mailbox relatively quickly, despite the pile of messages involved, and let me track its progress with a clear but unobtrusive progress icon.

Everywhere you turn in Postbox, you’ll find well-thought-out features that enhance your email experience. Message threads are easy to follow, with each message’s beginning and end clearly marked, and a quick reply box waiting at the end of the most recent message. An inspector pane next to each message shows you not only who sent it —and, with a click, their entire contact card from your address book—but breaks out any links, images, maps, or package delivery info it finds in the message.

Free art program for mac. You can also easily search for any messages, images, or attachments from a particular sender just by clicking links within their address book info. And if work requires you to send a lot of form responses, Postbox builds in that ability. Just compose your response in preferences, then choose it from a pulldown menu when you’re writing a new email. Postbox 3 Postbox plays nicely with many popular social and productivity tools. If you have Evernote installed, Postbox can send emails to that service to help you keep track of them.

Once you set up your account information, dragging and dropping files from your Dropbox will create links that let recipients download those files straight from your Dropbox account. And you can tie in your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to not only get links to your contacts on those services, but post to all three directly from Postbox. The program will even use the service to pull in images for your friends and acquaintances from one or more of those services. A helpful To-Do mode lets you create new tasks, or turn existing messages into tasks, then check them off as you finish.