Outlook made my email terrible. This free Windows 11 app fixed it

In the past, I’ve written about my dislike of Microsoft’s propensity to inject web tech into the Windows 11 shell. For as convenient as Edge WebView 2 (web app components) can be from an engineering flexibility and update cadence standpoint, they’re less performant, less visually pleasing, and more resource-hungry when compared to their native UI element counterparts.

For the most part, apps and UI surfaces that make use of WebView2 simply render standard Chromium website elements within a wrapper, as opposed to rendering them using native UI techniques, frameworks, and components. As a result, responsiveness and scalability take a hit, touch optimizations become an afterthought, visuals become a mishmash of design language principles, and background memory usage skyrockets since brower-based background processes need to boot up from sleep.

Windows 11 is downright saturated with WebView2. The tech can be found injected within the Widgets Board, Windows Search, the Copilot app, Sticky Notes, the Photo app’s image editor, and even the in-box video editor known as Clipchamp. While Microsoft has been slowly working on a new, native Widgets Board experience to replace the existing web-based version, the upcoming web-based agenda view feature within Windows’ calendar flyout is proof alone that the company has no intention of reversing course.

Perhaps most egregious of all is Microsoft’s decision to pull the plug on its solid Mail, Calendar, and People applications for Windows, which it did at the very end of 2024. These apps were built on the native Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app framework, having benefited from a number of enhancements and improvements dating all the way back to Windows 8’s release in 2012. Mail, Calendar, and People were modern apps that took advantage of the Windows platform in every sense of the word, with containerization, scalability, full-blown touch and gesture control implementation, and other modern niceties.

Simply put, the new Outlook is slow, clunky, visually messy, and near impossible to use comfortably in tablet mode.

Unfortunately, Microsoft decided that PC users can’t have anything nice in this world, and so it replaced these aforementioned apps with a new, consolidated Outlook app that is essentially the Outlook.com website wrapped inside an app window and masquerading as a native app. To add salt to this wound, reports indicate that the company plans to deprecate the classic Win32 Outlook client that ships as part of Microsoft Copilot 365 (formerly Office 365) for Windows. In a head-scratching move, Mac users are set to continue to reap the benefits of a well-designed (and native) Outlook app of their own.

Needless to say, this state of affairs is a bad one for the Windows platform as a whole, and I’m certainly not the only one complaining. Productivity — including email, calendar, and contact management — is tightly woven into Microsoft’s DNA, and so it’s alarming to see the company’s flagship OS ship with a substandard out-of-box Outlook experience. Simply put, the new Outlook is slow, clunky, visually messy, and near impossible to use comfortably in tablet mode.

Email on Windows 11 done right

Wino Mail is everything Outlook for PC should be and more

Enter Wino Mail: a free and open-source email client alternative for Windows 11 that essentially serves as a forked clone version of the original Microsoft-built Mail app. Upgraded to support modern WinUI3 framework and Fluent Design 2 principles with a visually appealing Mica material surface, I regard Wino as the spiritual successor to Mail et al. for the Windows 11 era.

“I’m a big fan of Windows Mail & Calendars due to its simplicity. Personally, I find it more intuitive for daily use cases compared to Outlook desktop and the new WebView2 powered Outlook version. Seeing Microsoft deprecate it dragged me into starting to work on Wino a couple of years ago. Wino’s main motivation is to bring all the existing functionality from Mail & Calendars over time without changing the user experience that millions have loved since the Windows 8 days in Mail & Calendars,” writes the developer on GitHub.

The Wino app itself is incredibly speedy and stable, in my experience, with it always delivering emails immediately, including when all active windows are closed. The main app interface is accessible from the system tray when minimized, and it consumes little in the way of background resources. Best of all, Wino Mail is adapted for touch, with built-in gestures for swiping to refresh inboxes and deleting emails.

Of course, being a smaller-scale project, Wino Mail isn’t jam-packed with all the full-fat desktop Outlook power users features that some might hope to see, but the former’s simplicity and zippiness more than makes up for this in my eyes. To be fair, there are a good number of personalization options on deck here, with options to adjust the theme, accent colors, spacing, panel length, default mailbox on launch, and more.

Wino Mail is compatible with Microsoft Live Accounts (MSN, Hotmail, Live, Outlook), as well Gmail, IMAP, and SMTO mail accounts. You’re able to add three separate email addresses to the app at any given time, though adding further simultaneous accounts is locked behind a paywall. Even without paying, the baseline experience is pleasant to the point where I honestly never want to use another email client for Windows 11 ever again. As far as modern PC apps go, Wino Mail sits among the very best of the genre.