The Best Email Client for IPhone
You have insane choices for iPhone email clients, and each one does things a little differently than the rest. Amazingly, we chose the best of these options for Microsoft Outlook. Yeah, we’re surprised too.
Perspectives
Platform: iPhone Price : Free download page
Functions
- Unified mailbox
- Works with Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and IMAP.
- Configurable swipe options for deleting, archiving and scheduling messages for the future
- Built-in calendar and contact list
- Attach files from email, OneDrive, Dropbox, and more.
- Several filtering options to quickly find emails
- Powerful and fast search
- Shows the most common recipients
- Focused Mode filters your most important emails upward
- Available for iPhone and iPad
Where is it best
As you would expect from Microsoft, Outlook tries to be as powerful as a desktop application. Given that this is Outlook, what’s surprising is that it does this without sacrificing usability. This is achieved in part because it is simply an updated version of the already fantastic rebrand Acompli . Even with all of its features, Outlook has a clean design that you can familiarize yourself with in just a few minutes. Outlook divides your email into two main sections: Target and Other. Focused is like the Gmail Priority Inbox, where Outlook learns which emails are important to you and puts them first. Everything else goes to the “Other” tab. You can also quickly filter your emails by Starred or Unread to easily find what you’re looking for. If you like sorting emails, you can delete, archive, and snooze emails using the swipe gesture.
Another primary task for Outlook is connecting to other services. You can add attachments from various cloud services and view your calendar without leaving the app. You can also use this calendar to set up meeting times and send them by email. In terms of notifications, you can set up calendar event notifications along with new emails for each account. If that’s too much for you, you can also set up notifications only for important emails that land on the Focused tab.
Where it fails
The perspective isn’t perfect. The Focused Inbox works incredibly well, but it takes a little time before it works, just like the Priority folder. Until then, you will have to manage your email (and notifications) for it to work as expected, and even then there is no manual override to ensure that you always receive notifications from the same person. The calendar, while handy, requires your calendar to be linked to your email, so if you just use the iOS and iCloud calendar option, it won’t show up in Outlook. It’s the same with your contacts. There isn’t much customization either, other than changing swipe gestures.
Competition
Outlook is definitely not the only email app to look out for. The built-in Apple Mail feature is a good choice for most users. The VIP mailing list makes it easy to keep you from being overwhelmed with notifications, and its deep integration with iOS means it’s the most affordable email app for the platform.
Newcomer Spark (free) is without a doubt the biggest competitor to Outlook and will probably overtake it as the best email app for iOS after an update. Once the application fixes some of the shortcomings and is fully functional, it becomes a great email application. Spark has an intelligent search engine, integrates with major cloud services, has a smart intelligent notification system, and is customizable in all sorts of ways. Spark is still in its infancy, so for some users it is a little buggy and crashing. It also has a number of features that are promised in updates soon, so as soon as they arrive, it will be much more powerful.
If you use Gmail, you also have three great options. Mailbox (free), Gmail’s Inbox (free), and Gmail (free) have their own strengths and weaknesses. The inbox is mainly for organizing email with swipes and other gestures, but it doesn’t work for anything else. Gmail’s Inbox and Spark are incredibly similar, with the caveat that Inbox is just Gmail. Its organizational system is very similar to Spark’s system, but it has a few additional options and many Google tricks , including creating to-do lists, setting up reminders, and merging emails. If you’re a big Gmail user, this is a good option. If Inbox is too unconventional for you, the Gmail app is a lot like a web app and does a great job of organizing your email. You can easily switch between accounts, organize and archive emails with a flick of your finger, and more.
For power users with multiple types of email accounts, Dispatch ($ 4.99) is designed for email handling and maximum automation. You can easily reply to emails with rich text snippets and quick replies. In addition, Dispatch connects to a variety of other services, so you can organize your emails into 31 apps, including Evernote, pocket, Reminders and more.
Other than that, a couple of other email apps are worth mentioning, including Boxer ($ 4.99), which focuses on quick replies, and CloudMagic (free), which connects to other apps so you can organize your email. using them instead of CloudMagic itself.