Best iPhone Email Apps
People always liked to send and receive letters; before the Internet allowed us to send and receive electronic mail, there was this thing called the postal service that carried people’s mail (be it letters, official acts or anything that people felt the need to write on a piece of paper and send to someone they know) from the sender to the receiver. Of course, the real precursor to electronic mail was the Morse code based telegraph. So people have always felt the need to communicate and that puts into perspective just how important electronic mail is now, when communication is more accessible than ever. And today we have computers, we have the Internet and we have phones that are as smart as our computers and that means that we can now send and receive our email on the go. As you probably know email is one of the most useful and one of the most utilized services, regardless of the type of device that you use, be it a desktop computer or a tablet or a smart phone.
So, you bought yourself an iOS device and you started using Apple’s mail.app, an email client that is used in all iOS devices (iPhone, iPod or iPad). The default mail application allows you to access your email account (or accounts), to verify and send emails but although mail.app works with most known email providers you may want more in terms of options and overall experience. You may want a better email client, especially because you use your iPhone (or any other iOS device that you may own) frequently and you also use your email frequently (either due to the nature of your work, either because you like or need to communicate or just to keep in touch with friends). So you have come to a point where you need a better email app than Apple’s default one, thus you are planning on getting an email app from the App Store. Well, you are in luck as the App Store offers an app for just about everything nowadays and there are plenty of email apps to choose from. But having a wide variety of apps to choose from might not be as good as it sounds, especially if you don’t know their pros and cons and you don’t have the time to dig that kind of information yourself. That is where we come in: we’ve put together a list that contains the best email clients that we deemed worthy of your iPhone (or any other iOS device really). All you have to do is take a few minutes of your time to read our article and we hope that at the end we provided enough useful information to have helped you make an informed decision. Without further ado, here are the best options to replace your default iOS email app.
iMailG
We will open the list with a free email client: iMailG. Most of you probably know that the iPhone’s default email client, mail.app, is not exactly the best application you can use if you have a Gmail account. And that is exactly where iMailG fits in: it is an email client made for Gmail users, that supports every mobile Gmail feature available now.
Features:
Speaking of features, besides supporting the current mobile Gmail features (such as plus, stars, labels, mute, reader, calendar, task, docs, news, photos, finance, transit, map and translate), the client also has a few features of its own: fast loading and account switching that can easily handle a huge amount of emails; Air-print web pages and email attachments and it can also save to other apps (e.g. Good Reader); another nice feature is that iMailG can open links in Safari or Google Chrome and it can also save images to the photo album; it also has an anti-phishing feature (it displays undisguised full link before going to an external link); instant PUSH notifications when you have new emails on your base account (and it also let’s you configure quiet time zone).
You can edit Gmail contacts easily (either add new ones or delete/merge existing ones); the email client can also search for every mail that you received from a specific sender as well as search and highlight specific texts in your emails. Another nice feature is that it lets you insert text and HTML signatures in your emails. The iMailG app also offers import/export settings via clipboard, a smart rotation clock and pass code protection (which is safely stored in the iOS keychain). Not ultimately, it lets you make lots of customizations (for example customizable shortcuts for internal search and external link; or you can assign different shake gestures etc.).
Pros and Cons:
When it comes to pros and cons, with iMailG things are pretty simple. As it is an app made with Gmail users in mind (being at its core a Gmail client with an iPhone interface), you will find that it does most things you would expect from it and then some – that is if you are a Gmail only user. Also because it is an app aimed at Gmail users, that means that if you would like more options (and not just Gmail related features) you may want to check other email apps. So you see, being a pretty specific email client (a client addressed to Gmail users in this particular case) weights both on this app’s pros and cons, so in the end it really depends on whether your email client of choice is Gmail or not. We forgot to mention: it is free, so even if you are not a Gmail user but would like to give it a try, you can do so without spending any money.
iPriorityMail
Continuing with the free email clients, we reach iPriorityMail, an app that is both an email client and a social media messages management tool. This is due to the fact that it provides instant pop up and ringtone notifications not only for important emails that you receive, but also for messages that you receive through social networks like Twitter, eBay, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Features:
We already mentioned iPriorityMail’s most important feature: that it provides notifications for your important emails and for messages that you receive through social networks. The app lets you choose the important emails that you want to be notified about (choose your priority contacts) and it lets you customize the alert so that you know who sent you the email before you even look at the email (not to mention that you can assign voice over ring tones that will enable you to easily identify specific emails). Not only that, but if you get a notification through one of the supported social networks, the app will allow you to reply through that particular social network without having to change apps, so if anything changes on one of your eBay bids, you will know and be able to respond instantly.
Some other useful features include the fact that the app lets you see the first line of the email and its subject so that you easily know what the email is about. It also allows you to reply the email simply, with the touch of a virtual button. Last but not least, an interesting feature is a summary page that allows you to see your most recent emails from all of your email accounts.
Pros and Cons:
It is worth mentioning that even though the application is compatible with all IMAP or POP3 accounts (Hotmail, Gmail, MobileMe, etc) it is also not compatible with some, so you will not receive push notifications if for example you have a free Yahoo web mail. It receives another thumbs down for not allowing you to assign your own custom ring tones (you can only choose from around 30 included ring tones). That said, the application is free (though banner ads based, as the developers need to make money from it somehow) or you can pay a subscription of 99 cents per month for the ads free version.
ibisMail
Another option to iPhone’s default email client is ibisMail, an email client developed by ibis inc., that has support for Dropbox among other features. In addition, because it supports a lot of protocols and authentications, it can connect to a very wide range of mail servers, which is pretty nice, especially if you have many email accounts and you want to use this email client for all of them.
Features:
As we already mentioned, this particular email client’s main selling point is that it supports Dropbox. The Dropbox functionality is quite simple; it allows you to save your attachment files (from your received emails) into your Dropbox account and vice versa: attach files from your Dropbox account into emails that you intend to send. Not only that, but you can also save your received emails into your Dropbox account, in case there is a very important email that you wish to keep for future use.
But Dropbox support is not the only important feature offered by ibisMail. It has many other features which we will present further in this article. ibisMail lets you create your own folders for better organization and you can set rules for message filtering. It also implements a search function in “Body”, “From”, “To”, “Subject” or “All”. When the application goes to background, it can maintain the communication, although this feature will not be available for you if your device is an iPhone 3G. ibisMail also supports fetch for POP and IMAP servers and you can receive Push notifications for IMAP server supported IMAP4 IDLE command – again we must warn you that if you are using an iPhone 3G, these features will not be available for you.
ibisMail also allows you to uncompress zip files, even if they are protected by a password; it also lets you open the attached files from your emails into other programs. Speaking of attachments, you can receive a huge number of attachment files formats (Word, Excel, Power Point, PDF, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, rtf, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, wav, mp3, air, mov, mp4, mpg) though you can not receive files bigger than 10 MB.
Other features include a macro template for when you write a new email, or reply to a received email or forward an email and the ability to save 1000 emails for each of your accounts. We mentioned that it can send and receive emails using most protocols (POP3, IMAP4, SMTP) and supports a wide range of authentications (APOP, POP before SMTP, CRAM-MD5 and Digest-MD5). It also supports a STARTTLS connection and self signed certificates. You can turn the sounds on or off (the app offers many samples to choose from) for sending and receiving emails. You can attach images from your camera roll and you can forward attachments like image files, Office files, zip, pdf etc. Among other nice features you can find, there are settings to subscribe/unsubscribe for each of your folders, a progress bar with the status message for when sending and receiving emails and last but not least, you can see the name of the contact on the Message List Screen and Message Body Screen.
Pros and Cons:
Supporting many protocols and authentications is a very useful pro, as that means that no matter where you have an email account, ibisMail will be compatible with your account. When it comes to cons, there are a few we must mentions, such as no option to auto filter Spam emails, not being able to delete emails from POP server and not being able to write a HTML email. One last thing to note is that if you turned on either the push or fetch functions for one (or more) accounts, the application will run the background communication and that will drastically reduce the battery’s life. So if you don’t want your battery to drain really fast, you will have to turn the push and fetch functions off. All in all, we believe the features that it offers outweigh the cons and ibisMail is a nice email client that strives to be a high performance email app and offers more functions than the iPhone’s default client. If you would like to give it a try, you can do so for the price of $3.99 and ibisMail is compatible with both the iPhone and the iPod touch and it requires iOS 4.0 or later.
mBoxMail
Remember how iMailG was as an email client made for people that use Gmail? Well, mBox Mail is the equivalent email client application for Hotmail users and it supports all the Hotmail features that you will need. Since it is not exactly a secret that Apple and Microsoft don’t get along quite well and that is pretty unfortunate for Hotmail users (and there are many people that use Microsoft’s email client either for business or just as personal email), who were stuck with the iPhone’s default email client, which is very limited for a person with a Hotmail account. mBox Mail to the rescue, a nice iOS app that does a great job at handling Microsoft email.
Features:
We said this app has all the features that a Hotmail user will need and we weren’t kidding. In case you have more than one Hotmail accounts (maybe a personal account and a business account) there is absolutely no problem as mBox Mail supports multiple accounts. You also have access to your Windows Live contacts. Also, there are push notifications and your accounts are protected (there is a password protection) so that you won’t have to worry about unauthorized use of your account (or accounts).
Another useful feature that mBox Mail comes with is that it lets you create new folders, edit them or delete the ones that you don’t need anymore. You can also move emails between your folders, which is pretty nice if you want to optimize your searches (searching through your emails being another useful feature of this email app) and have an organized email account. You can also sync your mobile email accounts with your web email accounts and you have the option to flag your emails as read or not read. A relatively exclusive (at least in the world of smartphone email clients) feature is the ability to attach large files. This is something you won’t need very often, but when you need it, you will probably be happy to be able to attach large files from your iPhone. Speaking of attaching files, mBox Mail allows you to both send and receive photos and you can even save the received photos right into your iPhone’s photo album. This email client includes an embedded web browser and it supports Windows Live custom domains.
Pros and Cons:
When counting its pros, (if you are a Hotmail user) you will find that mBox Mail does pretty much everything you would expect from a complete mobile email client dedicated to Hotmail users. It is a fast client (it offers good performance) that will offer you a complete experience if you have one or more Hotmail email accounts. However, the fact that it is an app aimed at a specific audience (Hotmail users) means that if you would like better integration (or more options) with other email services, you will better look elsewhere. Unfortunately, it has a somewhat prohibiting price – at ten bucks it is the priciest email client for smartphones in this entire list. It doesn’t have much cons, especially if you use Microsoft email, but its raised price may be just a bit over what most iPhone users might be willing to spend on an email client, especially ones that do not have a Hotmail account (though them may also stay true for people with Hotmail accounts too). If however you are a Microsoft email users with ten dollars to spend on a mobile email client, then without a single doubt mBox Mail is the right choice for you.
eMailGanizer Pro
eMailGanizer Pro is an iPhone email reader developed by GoodHumans with the slogan “email reader for people who use mail folders”. It is an iPhone email client that uses the IMAP protocol and it comes with a lot of useful features. However, just like iMailG (which was designed with people that are Gmail users in mind) and mBox Mail (also made for a specific category of users: those that use Microsoft email), eMailGanizer too was made with a very specific idea in mind. Unlike the above mentioned email client apps, eMailGanizer was not made for users of a particular email client, but for users that like to keep their inbox as clean and tidy as possible. For this very specific reason (and for that specific category of users) this IMAP email reader was made.
This email app is a great choice if you are the kind of person that likes to keep everything in order. The app allows you to easily file emails and organize them in many many folders and as we already said it is made for people that like to store their important emails in folders and wish to do it from their personal iPhone.
Features:
Its main and most powerful feature is of course, the ability to easily organize your email in many, many folders. It can store a lot of messages and no matter how many you have, you can file them with only two taps in a matter of seconds. It is simple and easy and you can do it on the go, without having to wait until you get home to file your important emails. The app uses an advanced algorithm that analyzes and learns (storing data from each email filing) your filing behavior so that it can predict and offer you the folders that are the most significant to the email you are filing – this way filing emails is significantly improved. In regards to filing process, some of the features this app offers are: the ability to search for destination folders’ names, a ‘shake to undo the previous email filing’ feature and you can also batch deletes, moves and filing emails to various folders. You can also file a message to your favorites emails instantly.
The app is also nicely integrated with your iPhone as it can add emails as events in your iPhone calendar. Besides integration with the iPhone calender, it also provides integration with your task manager and it is also Outlook compatible which means that it allows you to add emails as tasks to Exchange / Outlook and Toodledo, not to mention you can add your emails to a bunch of To-Do Apps such as OmniFocus, Appigo, Thins, The Hit List, Firetask and others.
We should say a few things about the folders feature. It is probably obvious that you can add, move, rename and delete folders as well as search through your existing folders if you need to quickly find the one you are interested in. Another nice feature is folder navigation, done via an Expand – Collapse style view. Also, as you might expect, this email app has an universal inbox folder, an Unread folder and other similar ‘Smart’ folders. Another nice thing is that you can work offline and the app will synchronize all of your recently modified folders the next time that you go online.
As previously stated, eMailGanizer uses the IMAP protocol and that means that it is compatible with Gmail, Rackspace ,Yahoo mail, AOL, iCloud and whatever other modern email account you may have. It is also compatible with Hotmail and of course, Outlook. Among some of its other features, there are: an option for full text email search, email threading (for a simplified email review) with conversation view, the ability to choose from many different color schemes to suit your particular liking, pass code protection and you can mark your received emails as read or unread and flagged. Another feature is its use of iSpeech (a free text to speech and speech recognition engine) to convert your emails from text to spoken emails.
Pros and Cons:
eMailGanizer is a very powerful email client app that offers lots of useful features. And if you are the kind of person that likes to keep his email as organized as possible, look no further as you may not find a better email app – this is probably the perfect email client from that particular point of view. That is not to say the email client is without faults. There are a few cons we will address next and they relate to the app missing a few features. One will be the lack of a unified inbox feature for all your accounts.
Another missing feature, far more important this time, is the lack of support for the POP3 protocol. eMailGanizer does not support POP3 because the protocol is unable to handle cloud based email folders and thus synchronization cannot be achieved (e.g. if you file a POP3 email into a folder on your desktop, you will not be able to access it from your iPhone due to the reason mentioned above). This is the biggest inconvenient of this otherwise very good email client – if you happen to use a POP3 email account, you are out of luck and you will have to orient yourself toward another mobile email app. There is also another issue with eMailGanizer. Because it makes use of the iPhone’s email framework for sending emails, you must setup any of your accounts (from which you wish to send emails) in the standard iPhone settings.
Whether you are a very organized person (which reflects in the way your email is kept) or not, you should definitely give this app a try especially given that the app is free for the normal version, which uses banner ads in order to make money. Or, if you find the banner ads to be too intrusive, you can pay about five bucks for the add free (Pro) version of the app. Either way, you will find it is a very powerful email app.
Email ‘n Walk
Be honest, how many times have you tried writing an email from your smartphone on the go? In this day and age when the phrase ‘time is money’ is more important than ever and time never seems to be enough, we try to do as much as we can in as little time as possible. And with the advent of smartphone,s writing emails on the go became as easy (and useful) as it can be, though a bit dangerous, particularly for those of us without very high distributive attention. Email ‘n Walk is an email client that lets you write emails on the go, as you probably guessed by now. What is so special about it you may ask and rightfully so as there are a lot of mobile email clients that allow you to send emails on the go. Well, Email ‘n Walk does it with a twist.
Features:
So what’s the twist? Thanks to Phase2 Media’s Email ‘n Walk, you can now write emails safely, without the risk of getting run over by a car. It manages to do that by using the iPhone’s camera. When you open the app, Email ‘n Walk will use your iPhone’s rear camera to give you a live feed view of your surroundings. The live feed is used as a background and the email client’s transparent interface is displayed over it. It cannot be easier: you open the email client and you type the subject and the email’s body text while walking and being able to see where you walk. When you are finished writing your email, all you need to do is press send and Email ‘n Walk will send your message into the iPhone’s default mail app. From there you will have to follow the usual steps (choose the recipients and send the message). That is Email ‘n Walk’s main (and innovative) feature and it is a very fun and more importantly fluent process. However, we advise you to follow the developer’s recommendation: “We can’t take any responsibility for your stupidity, so please don’t go walking into traffic, off of cliffs, or into the middle of gunfights while emailing”.
Pros and Cons:
This email app is an innovative app and its main selling point is of course the ability to write emails while walking and at the same time see where you walk. It is not nearly as feature rich as some of the email apps presented in this article, but it is a very original app. Unfortunately it is not a full fledged email client and you still need the iPhone’s default mail app to send emails. There is also the fact that, since your iPhone’s camera can only show you what is in the direction it is directed toward, you still have to check your surroundings once in a while. Another thing you may not like is that Email ‘n Walk does not display the live feed on the entirety of your iPhone’s screen – instead, the lower half of the screen is used by the not exactly transparent virtual keyboard. Bottom line, if you simply can’t stop whatever it is you are doing whether you are watching a movie, walking, bungee jumping (we are kidding about this one… really, don’t try it while writing emails) or whatever else you might be doing, Email ‘n Walk is for you and you can download it for only 99 cents.
Sparrow
We have saved this email application for the final part of this article, as it is one of the most popular mobile email clients and also one of the best there is (and some people consider it to be the best iPhone email client). It is a complete email client (with exceptional Gmail support), designed to make your email reading and writing experience as good and as easy as possible. Read further to understand why Sparrow is such a well seen iPhone email client.
Features:
One thing that elevates Sparrow is its interface. We know an email client’s interface is not a feature per se, but we will still write a few words about Sparrow’s interface. Besides looking good, the interface’s strength lies in how easy it manages to make using this email client’s many features. With a simple swipe over one of your emails, you can access the special features and with a simple swipe past your email Sparrow will display your settings. Also, with a simple up or down swipe on an email you can navigate through a conversation. Everything is literally one swipe away (once to reveal your mailboxes, labels and folders and another swipe to go to your account list). Writing emails is easy and intuitive from the get go, without wasting any time investigating how things work or what you need to do. That is the power of Sparrow’s user interface and while not really a feature it is a part of this email client that smooths your overall experience with it.
Sparrow’s well executed interface however is not its only strong point. This email client abounds of useful features which we will now present. It provides an unified inbox which means that you will be able to see all of your email accounts in a single location. A search option allows you to find the mail you need either via a local or remote search. You can mark messages as read or unread (simply press on a message for a short time to mark it read or unread) and you can also mark all messages as read, which is a pretty nice feature for a mobile email client.
Sparrow has full IMAP and POP support and that means it is compatible with many email accounts (Gmail – and we must say that Sparrow offers all of Gmail’s features and an extraordinary support for people that have a Gmail account – , Hotmail, Google Apps, iCloud, Yahoo, AOL and Mobile Me just to name a few). A nice feature is that it lets you attach a photo or image directly when sending an email. Those of you that love social networks will be happy to find out that Sparrow integrates with several social networks and also with your address book. This address book integrations allows for a nice feature: you can add your friends’ profile pictures to each email; it is both nice and useful as you can know with a single glance who is the email’s sender. Speaking of contacts, there is a smart contacts feature that keeps your most frequent contacts on top of the list.
This email app also includes an integrated web browser, so in case you need to quickly find some information online while writing an email, you can do so directly from the email client. There is also priority inbox support and that will help especially people that receive a large amount of emails as your important emails will be separated from the not so important ones. You might also find useful the following features: an alias feature (if you have a pro and a private email address, this feature will help in keeping things separated) and a pull refresh feature which is a very simple way to refresh.
Pros and Cons:
One of this email client’s most notable missing features is its lack of push notifications. There is a way to add push notifications to Sparrow and it involves a jailbreak hack. It is, unfortunately, the only way as due to the client having been purchased by Google, there will be no official updates. And that takes us to another negative aspect of this email client: as we already said, after the Google acquisition the development of Sparrow ceased (almost) completely and there will be no new updates or features added; there will only be a few bug fixes and that is it.
However, these minor shortcomings are not really enough to diminish any of its (many) positive aspects or the fact that it is one of the best email clients available for your iPhone. And when you find out that after being released (on the ninth of February 2011) in the Mac App Store it became the top paid and the top grossing app in less than a single day, you begin to realize just how good this email client is and you start to question whether the hype surrounding it may actually be justified. A simplified user interface that works like a charm and a full set of (very useful) features are its arguments and the reason why for many iPhone users Sparrow is the best email client on the device. For only three dollars you can try it and decide for yourself if it suits your tastes and needs; we recommend it!
Closing Words
As an iPhone owner you may want a better and more solid email client than the default one that is included in your smartphone. And whether you want to use a free email client or a paid one, whether you want an email client made for a specific email service (be it Hotmail or Gmail) or just an overall good email client or maybe an innovative one, the App Store will not fail you as it has many options for you to choose from. we have selected and detailed the ones we thought are among the best and worthy of your attention, but as always, the decision is yours and yours alone.
