Email is important to me. As a consultant and entrepreneur, I get a lot of email, and have to process it efficiently. If I didn't, I could easily spend a large proportion of my day just dealing with email. I might add, I don't actually like email. Given the choice, I'd abolish email, and move to a messaging-style system such as Slack or one of it's competitors. But given that 90% plus of the communicating that I do is "external", rather than to people that work with me regularly, that's not an option.
My way of processing email efficiently is "Inbox Zero". Inbox Zero is an approach to email management aimed at keeping your inbox empty -- or almost empty -- at all times. In essence, the idea is to immediately either delete, archive or respond to as many emails as you can. Those that you can't immediately respond to, you defer. So to the extent possible, for as many emails as possible, you only deal with them once, rather than leaving them in your inbox forever, to be opened and reopened.
Until a few days ago, I used Mailbox on both my iPad and desktop, despite the fact that the desktop app was notoriously buggy. Mailbox was originally a stand-alone startup, but was taken over by Dropbox in 2013. However, Dropbox has now decided to discontinue Mailbox, much to my horror and annoyance. So I am now faced with having to replace Mailbox.
The reason why Mailbox was great for me was that on the iPad you could swipe any email in your inbox, and depending on swipe direction and length, you could delete, archive, or postpone any email. So one swipe per email to Inbox Zero. Very efficient.
In order to find a new email app, I've been looking though quite a list of options. Mailbox's creation triggered a lot of activity in the field. Numbers of new email apps, all with subtly different approaches to handling email, emerged. This is my take on the apps that I've looked at. This is by no means a full review of each - some apps were clearly not suitable for me, and I abandoned them almost immediately, without more than perfunctory testing.
Mail Pilot
Mail Pilot, from Mindsense, was the first app that I looked at, and the one that I had the highest hopes for, because unlike pretty much all the other apps on my list, Mindsense has apps for both iOS and OS X. Also, it has the option to defer emails, which is something that not all apps have. I chose to test (actually, I bought) the desktop version first, but was disappointed. It works reasonably well - certainly it's more reliable than Mailbox's desktop app ever was. But there were occasional problems syncing, and occasional strange behavior. But my real problem with Mail Pilot is that it's just ugly - the tool bar icons look like something from Windows 95. Really. Also, I found the user interface to be non-intuitive. So it's just not something I can see myself using regularly. I didn't test the iPad version; there's no free trial, and I had already lost faith that Mail Pilot was for me.Zero
Zero also initially looked good. There's no Mac app, but when Mail Pilot fell by the wayside, it became clear to me that I probably wasn't going to find a multi-platform solution anyway. Zero ticked most of my boxes - a nice clean interface, and swipe to archive, etc. It doesn't have a true defer option, but does offer a scheme of prioritizing emails.However, Zero proved to be very buggy. When new emails came in, the badge count incremented, but the new email didn't appear in the inbox. Huh?? Also, Zero doesn't have push notifications, even on GMail, where push is very easy. I contacted MailFeed, but they were unable to resolve the issue of the inbox not updating, other than suggesting that I do a manual update.
MailDeck
MailDeck, from Crono, is an interesting app. Unlike some of the other apps that I tried, it worked flawlessly, and supports turning emails into tasks. However, it has a few issues:- Firstly, the user interface is a bit unconventional. For example, the inbox uses a grid display. On an iPad, three columns are shown in landscape, and two in portrait, with a total of six emails displayed in summary form. But other apps with more conventional layouts, e.g., Mailbox, Outlook, etc, show summaries of six or seven emails and the full version of a selected email.
- No single swipe to action an email; you have to touch the action button, then touch what you want to do.
- The display also uses lots of colors; it's not exactly in line with the "flat" iOS 9 design.
- Finally, while the app does support turning emails into tasks, the process is unintuitive, and doesn't have the simplicity of just deferring an email.
Spark
Spark, from Readdle, comes with a major recommendation: Apple has picked Spark as the “Best of the App Store 2015”! It also ticks most of my boxes. However, there's a huge problem - Spark doesn't support the iPad. It will run, but with iPhone screen resolution. So not an option for me - I do a lot of emailing on my iPad.Inbox
Google's Inbox app is well known, and it's a very serious contender. As well as being specifically designed to facilitate Inbox Zero, it has a whole list of smart features that no other email app provides, such as check-in for flights, shipping information for purchases, etc. It also integrates fully with Gmail accounts, handles appointments well, etc. And is very reliable. If I had to, I could live with Inbox. But for me, Inbox also has some less than ideal features:- No unified inbox. Apparently the Android version does have a unified inbox, but not the iOS version. That may change soon, but for the moment, this is a deal killer for me.
- Strange iPad user interface. Inbox's user interface on the iPhone is fine, but on the iPad has huge amounts of wasted space. It's as if Google built Inbox as a universal app, but only designed the display for the iPhone.
- Inbox only supports Gmail accounts. Which is a bit of a problem if you have other accounts!
Boxer
Boxer, which comes with the tagline "A better inbox", is functionally the best Mailbox replacement that I have been able to find. The user interface isn't quite as clean and fluid as Mailbox, but Boxer has short and long swipes to either the left or right for emails in it's inbox, and each kind of swipe is customizable. So Boxer is one of the few email apps that fully delivers on Mailbox's "one swipe to action" paradigm. There's also a lot of other features to like:
- Integrated scheduling. This is actually a big deal in many situations, one of the problems with Mailbox was that it didn't do scheduling. Boxer really does, which is great.
- Connections to other services such as Evernote, Dropbox, Facebook, etc
- The iOS version connects to Sanebox, which automatically categorizes your email, also very handy.
However, I did have reliability issues with Boxer. The contacts screen didn't always display my contacts. Strangely, when sending an email, my contacts appeared as autocomplete options, but Boxer's contacts screen was blank. I also had problems with Boxer not responding to changes in screen orientation on my iPad. Worse, technical support was non-existent. When I contacted Boxer about the problems, I received a automatic acknowledgement promising a response "as soon as possible", but that response never came. (Update - Boxer did eventually respond, but more than a week later. And the response didn't give a fix.)
CloudMagic
CloudMagic is a bit of an outlier on this list. It's hugely popular, but viewed as an app for InBox Zero, or as a Mailbox replacement, it really doesn't stack up. There's no swipe support, so actioning an email is a matter of two button presses. It does have support for deferring emails, but in a bit of a obscure way; you have to touch and hold on the star button. The default options for how long to defer are not really well thought out. If you get an email late at night, you might want to defer it till tomorrow morning, which is an option that than several other apps have. But CloudMagic's closest option to "tomorrow" is "24 hours", which is not ideal. So you have to manually set tomorrow 9am. But CloudMagic still deserves a look because of it's other features:
- Most important, CloudMagic is beautiful. In fact, CloudMagic got a Webby for its visual design. Of the apps I tried, it's the only one with a better user interface than Mailbox. Most of the other apps, and Maildeck is the worst offender, have ugly toolbar icons and/or garish colors. CloudMagic has a clean, understated look, but still manages to work fluidly.
- CloudMagic works with pretty much any email provider, including IMAP accounts.
- CloudMagic's big party trick is integration with other web services. Rather than viewing itself as the one app that you're going to use for everything, CloudMagic seems to view itself as coordinating between email and other services. It uses the paradigm of "cards", that can be sent to services such as Salesforce, Evernote, Pocket, Zendesk, Trello, MailChimp, DropBox, etc, etc.
I tried CloudMagic's integration with Trello, which I use for project management anyway, and it worked exactly as advertised, the CloudMagic card showing up on my selected Trello board. For some people, this is likely to a very useful integration, and may justify CloudMagic all on its own. In effect, you can use passing an email to Trello, or another supported service, as a "defer" option. The only problem with this is that you don't get the email back to reply to. In my case, I frequently need to reply to deferred emails, which makes the CloudMagic to Trello workflow less than perfect.
Outlook
Outlook, from Microsoft, might not be what some people expect to see on this list. Saying Microsoft Outlook tends to bring up the image of the solid but clunky app that Microsoft ships with Office. Outlook for mobile is a different product, with a much more streamlined interface. It does pretty much everything that you'd want from a mobile email client, including calendaring. Outlook also has good support for Inbox Zero, with email scheduling, and swipe options.
The only downside to Outlook is that the swipe options aren't very flexible. Firstly, there is only left and right swipe, not short and long swipe as well, so you can't swipe for all three of delete, archive and defer. You have to chose two. If you only ever archive emails rather than deleting some, that may not be a problem for you. Secondly, you can't do things such as configuring to delete and mark as read. So you end up with unread emails in your deleted folder, which can cause some other email clients to show unread emails in their badge count.
In use, Outlook was, at least for me, rock solid, with no signs of the kind of glitches that marred my experience with some other apps.
Conclusions
So what email app should you chose? Well, that depends:
- If you only have a single Gmail account to worry about, then Inbox may be your best bet. It's got lots of convenience features that others just don't have.
- If you're looking for the best Mailbox replacement, then Boxer is the obvious choice, if you can deal with occasional glitches, and no tech support. But the flexibility of Boxer's swipe options make it the best Mailbox replacement. And it does calendaring!
- If you're not too worried about Inbox Zero, and the ability to conveniently defer emails, then CloudMagic is an intriguing choice. Certainly you should check out the list of available integrations, and see if CloudMagic can help you out.
- If you want something that is reliable, has full Inbox Zero functionality, and you don't mind swipe options that aren't quite as well thought out as some of the other apps, the Outlook may well be the way to go.
At the end of the day, I'll be going with Outlook. The various glitches I had with Boxer just don't seem worth the better swipe options. But I will be keeping a close eye on CloudMagic. If they ever implement swipe options similar to Mailbox, I'll be changing over.
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