I have an expanse of blank white wall behind my desk, which always bugs me when I see myself on Zoom calls. This has been a stone in my shoe for three years since videoconferencing became commonplace. I’m jealous when I see other people have excellent backgrounds for their Zoom calls.

A friend suggested I just get a couple of guitars and put them behind me. “But I don’t play guitar,” I said. “Doesn’t matter,” my friend said. “Anybody asks, you just make a sad face and say, ‘Oh, I just don’t have time to play anymore.’”

I found a local shop that sells movie posters, with a focus on midcentury grindhouse horror movies. Having a poster for “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” hanging behind me for business meetings would definitely send a message.

Mimestream is a native Mac app for accessing Gmail. It gives you Gmail’s advanced capabilities, including Priority Inbox, categories, and labels, in an app that looks and works like a native Mac app. 

The alternatives to Mimestream are Gmail’s web interface, which I find cluttered, or native Mac mail apps, which look and work like Mac apps should but don’t give you all of Gmail’s capabilities. 

Mimestream has been in beta and free to use for years. I’ve been using Mimestream for most of that time. Now, Mimestream exits beta and gets a few juicy new features for organizing multiple accounts, muting some accounts at scheduled times (for example, if you’d like to mute your work account during personal time), configuring filters and more. Templates with variables will be useful for people who repeatedly send versions of the same email, such as customer support. And a menu bar extra lets you check to see what’s new without opening the app.

Other features of Mimestream: Support for Markdown formatting, Google calendar responses, Google Contacts integration, mentioning colleagues to bring them into the conversation, and syncing with Gmail signatures. More here.

Mimestream is a fast app. With it, I can fly through my email quickly, with minimal hassle. I’ve been using Gmail for more than 15 years, and there are still aspects of that interface I find confusing. That’s not a problem with Mimestream.

I’ve liked using Mimestream and will gladly pay for it. Pricing is US$49.99/year or $4.99/mo. Beta users, like me get 50% off for the first year. $25 is a reasonable price for a year of an app I use all day, every workday.

People who are only occasional Gmail users looking for an alternative to the Gmail Web interface might be happy just sticking with built-in Apple Mail, which is free with your (expensive) Mac. In the past, Apple Mail was unreliable with Gmail, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem lately.

Mimestream was founded by Neil Jhaveri, a software engineer who worked at Apple 7½ years, leading and managing engineering teams working on Mail and Notes. According to the product roadmap, the company is working on expanding Mimestream beyond Gmail to support other mail services, including Microsoft Outlook. They're also working on iPad and iPhone versions of Mimestream.

Pizza is my favorite food. We have pizza once a week. There have been times in my life when I have had it more often than that. I have had great pizza and I have had good pizza. I love the pizza they served on Fridays in the school cafeteria when I was a little kid. I loved riding my bike up Larkfield Road with my friends, and getting a slice of pizza at the place on that road. I love going back to New York and getting pizza from places with formica counters that serve you slices on paper plates. I love Chicago deep dish pizza, but I’m told it is not the pizza that Chicagoans eat. I love the pizza that we have when we go back to Ohio to visit Julie‘s family. Ohio pizza is covered edge to edge with pepperoni, cut into strips, and baked with a coating of cornmeal on the bottom to keep it from burning in the oven. Even frozen pizza, bar pizza and cafeteria pizza is delicious. Of all the thousands and thousands of pizza meals I have eaten in my life, only one was bad.