Microsoft has announced that Outlook for Mac is now free to download and use on the Mac App Store. Starting today, users no longer need a Microsoft 365 subscription to access Microsoft's advanced email client, something that has technically yet to happen on Windows.

Among its many capabilities, Outlook for Mac can bring together multiple accounts from different email services, and it's designed from the ground-up for macOS devices. It features a design language consistent with macOS itself, plus it's optimized for Apple Silicon, so it runs even faster on the M1 and M2 families of chips.

Microsoft also announced a few new features coming to Outlook for Mac in the near future. For starters, you'll soon be able to use the menu bar on macOS to peek at your upcoming events in Outlook, on top of already having support for Widgets and reminders in the notification center. Another new feature coming soon is called Outlook Profiles, which integrates with the Focus profiles on macOS. This allows you to assign specific accounts to different profiles so when you get a message from a personal account while you're working, you won't be distracted by it, and you can also shut off work when you're outside your working hours.

The company says it's working on more features to bring to Outlook for Mac and that it's rebuilding the client from the ground up to make it faster and more reliable. This will still be a fully native app, unlike the unified version of Outlook for Windows the company has been working on for a while now. This web-based app has been in testing for some time now, though it's still not fully available and missing some features. It's also not free to use (yet) as the preview is mostly available for Microsoft 365 Insiders with a valid subscription.

If you're interested in trying it out now that it's free, you can download Outlook for Mac here.

Source: Microsoft