A Mailbird alternative that is not tied to one computer

What Mailbird’s own pricing implies

Mailbird’s page sells a free tier limited to one account and one device, and a Premium licence — €2.30 per user per month billed yearly, or €73.80 per user once — covering one user on up to three devices with unlimited accounts. Its comparison table puts advanced search, snippets, snooze, undo send, send later, dark mode, Exchange support and a ChatGPT integration behind that licence, and a separate Lifetime Updates add-on at €65 buys all future versions.

For a single Windows machine that is inexpensive and clear. The shape of the deal is a licence for software you install, which means the sync, the search and the archive all live where you installed it.

What Mailbind does instead

• Nothing installed, so no device count: the same mailboxes open on any browser you sign into.
• Server-side sync, so the list is current when you open it and search is instant across every mailbox.
• Replies that leave from the address that received the message, across all of them.
• Shared inboxes for a team, which a desktop licence cannot do at any price.
• English, French and Arabic with a mirrored right-to-left layout.

What you would lose

The pay-once licence, first of all: €73.80 once against €12 a month is not close, and if you dislike subscriptions that is a real argument that no feature list answers. You would also lose local storage of your archive, Exchange support, Mailbird’s email tracking and templates, and its app sidebar.

And you would be trusting a server with a copy of your mail. Mailbind encrypts credentials with AES-256-GCM, hosts in the European Union and publishes its sub-processor list, but a desktop client with everything on your own disk is a stronger position by construction, and some people should take it.

Moving from Mailbird without moving your mail

Nothing has to be migrated, which is the one genuinely easy part of leaving Mailbird. Your mail lives at your provider — Google, Microsoft, your host — and both products are clients reading it over IMAP. Connecting Mailbind adds a reader; it does not move a message.

That means you can run both at once for as long as you like. Two IMAP clients on the same mailbox is a normal thing to do, and what one marks as read the other sees as read.

1. 1Connect your two busiest mailboxes to Mailbind on the Free plan.
2. 2Leave Mailbird installed and signed in. Nothing is being cut over.
3. 3Work from Mailbind for a week, including the replies you would normally dread — the ones where the sender address matters.
4. 4Add the aliases that arrive in those mailboxes and verify them, so replies leave from the right address.
5. 5If it fits, add the rest of the mailboxes and move up a plan. If it does not, disconnect, and Mailbind’s copy of your mail is deleted.

There is one thing to check before you commit: the folder names. Both clients map the special folders — Sent, Drafts, Archive, Spam, Trash — and if your provider uses unusual names, confirm that archiving and deleting land where you expect before you rely on it.

The other alternatives, honestly

• Thunderbird — free and open source, with your archive on your disk and no licence at all.
• eM Client — a licensed desktop client with a pay-once option and a calendar, free for two accounts.
• Spark — a native app with a generous free tier for several accounts.

Common questions

Keep reading

• All alternatives
• Mailbind vs Mailbird
• Mailbind vs eM Client
• Spark alternative
• Security at Mailbind
• Connect a mailbox