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

Microsoft is making the Outlook for Mac app free, the company announced this week. Previously available with a Microsoft 365 account or as part of the Office for Mac suite, the Outlook app can be downloaded from the Mac App Store and works with Outlook.com, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and plain old IMAP and POP email accounts.

Microsoft already offers a free version of the Outlook client for iOS and Android and is currently testing a preview of a redesigned Outlook app that will replace the built-in Mail and Calendar apps that ship with Windows 11.

The Mac version of the app doesn’t use this new design—it’s the same Outlook for Mac app that Microsoft released back in late 2020—but the company’s blog post says the company is working on “rebuilding Outlook for Mac from scratch.”Presumably, this will be the same client that Microsoft is testing on Windows as part of the company’s One Outlook project (also called Project Monarch), which aims to create a single, unified email client that looks and works the same across all supported platforms.

Part of this One Outlook project means that all email accounts look and act the same in Outlook, and for that, the Outlook app goes a little further than most email clients when syncing with third-party email providers. When you use non-Microsoft IMAP email accounts, such as Gmail, in the Outlook for Mac app, Microsoft will constantly sync emails, calendar appointments, and contacts with its own servers, effectively keeping a second copy of all data already stored in your email. provider.

At the very least, the new Outlook for Mac is a welcome alternative to Apple’s built-in Mail and Calendar apps, which mostly work fine most of the time but improve very little between macOS releases. Outlook for Mac will run on macOS 11.0 (Big Sur) or later, and like most Microsoft apps these days, it’s a generic binary app that runs natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. It also supports Handoff features when using the iOS version of Outlook on a phone that’s signed in to the same iCloud account as your Mac.