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I am surprised that so few reviews of email apps mention Gmail label support. I don’t mean IMAP support, because all of them support that. I mean Gmail labels in particular, since this is such a huge feature for Gmail users, which most people are. The ability to easily add or remove multiple labels to an email is key for a Gmail user, and not all of these apps, if any, support that. I’d love to know see a review of apps that support this feature. This is the main reason I don’t use them currently (I’ve tried and used all of these in the past, except Spike).
 
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Everyone calling out Edison, but Spark has the same shady practices.

Outlook is the clear winner for now. I'd use the default mail app since I have more trust in Apple to protect privacy than Microsoft, but I can't live without Gmail push notifications.

I called out Readdle they had a "shadier" policy in the past but refined it a bit. Still dont trust free by any small company. First party apps (Outlook, Gmail, Protonmail, Yahoo) are excluded as the mail subscribers are paying for the servers anyway so the app is to keep you in their ecosystem not to monetize emails.

Yep, and reviews like this one from MacRumors are not helping by completely ignoring the privacy aspect which I assume most people are not even aware about to consider.

To my knowledge all “Mail clients” listed in this review store your credentials and hijack your emails routing them through their servers.

If you are comfortable with a random company (who does not even charge you any money, which alone should be alarming) to read your emails it is your choice. But please make this aspect obvious in the reviews.

EDIT: Also if you plan to use these clients for your work email, make sure that your company’s IT security policies allow it. Typically they don’t.

I agree. It is irresponsible to put up a review and not discuss data privacy when some of these are well known to breach it via MR's own prior articles.

But again, the first party clients mentioned above and my quoted post are exempt from that typically. The paid users are paying for the servers and the app is to keep you locked in their ecosystem (Gmail, Outlook, Protonmail, Yahoo etc), not harvest data. They just happen to allow other email accounts to be added as a feature as that is the norm

Company security issues are completely separate issues than privacy and a separate topic really. The irony is some of these "policies" made by people with zero tech knowledge. For example prohibiting employees from using the Outlook app when the company runs off Exchange/365 and Microsoft ALREADY has the password on their servers. It's not like you are giving MS something they didn't already have. I get if you are government or have a private corporate server but most dont go that route anymore as hosted is cheaper and cleaner to use.

Some of these policies are made by people with zero rational idea of how tech works. But that is a separate rant (which as the boss I dont have to deal with as I set the policies, thank god).
 
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All of which you must provide your email password, and every email traverses their servers.

I did this with Airmail shortly, and they screwed up and forced 4 password resets with iCloud in 48 hours. Once I knew they were a proxy, it was immediately back to the iOS app. It's not just a better UI; it's a server you have to trust. I don't anymore after being burned.

Just be sure you are comfortable with all of your emails going through the servers of the app you use.

(Edit: remember, if something is free, you're the product...)

This is always a concern for privacy. I'm curious if Outlook does the same or not (go through MS servers).
 
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As far as I can tell, neither Edison nor Outlook allows me to file emails in folders for *other* email accounts. It's something I do all the time as I use my gmail account as my primary repository of all emails, whether from yahoo, iCloud, or elsewhere.

It's something that the inbuilt app easily allows.
 
This is always a concern for privacy. I'm curious if Outlook does the same or not (go through MS servers).

Of course it goes through their servers that is how email pushes to the app. The only app with a direct connection to the mail accounts is the stock email app; private APIs or something like that.

But considering Microsoft hosts 365 for some of the world's largest companies, what really is the odds they care about scanning your email or anything malicious via the Outlook app?

I would trust them leaps and bounds over some fly by night companies like Edison or Readdle (in the Ukraine none the less and no jurisdiction to go after them in the US by authorities) which could be gone tomorrow like many in the past have and dont care about repercussions.
 
Airmail now stinks. I used it for years, but the devs never fixed recurring bugs or updated the UI, and I got tired of waiting for a refresh.

Yeah... I feel ya. I've been using Airmail for years and it's okay. It does seem to be getting pokier and pokier. It seriously needs a top to bottom recode to bring it up to date. I stick with it for two reasons: I don't trust 'free' mail apps that require you to use their servers, and the built-in Apple Mail is curiously bloated, taking almost a gigabyte of memory that can't be flushed. I got tired of having to delete and re-enter all my mail accounts just to get the memory footprint back down to a reasonable 200MB.

Email apps seem to be one of those things that aren't cool to dev anymore so the UX seems to be going backwards.
 
I love Airmail. So many great email apps available on iOS. On Android? No. Not at all.

Until you can change your default apps, there is no point in any of these. No matter how great an email app is its too much of a pain to have stupid iOS open its stupid Mail app every time.

Same with Browsers
 
I have tried most of these apps, and each have flaws, but agree that Outlook does some of the best job. The main issue for all of these is how they handle Yahoo emails (don't ask why I still keep a Yahoo address). Connection to Yahoo servers is excruciatingly slow, and a lot of spam goes through. Therefore, my main criteria for apps are how fast they connect, how they show updated badges in real time, and how they display content. Another key factor is quickly understanding who is cc-ed or not, without this taking half of the screen.

AirMail has issues with formatting some emails with pictures, where the text is unreadably small if there is a picture included. It also tends to be a little slow to update. If many people are cc-ed, it takes too much space on the screen.

Edison has the best real time badge update, but it completely fails with Yahoo accounts and jumps all around, going to the top of the page while loading content and crashing a lot. I reported the issues many times but the app is unusable in my hands.

I do not care for the Spark interface not taking advantage of the entire screen.

Outlook is amazing at parsing important mail from other listings, and is overall the most solid. I have my work account there.

I continue to use iOS Mail for privacy for my main personal mail accounts, and because it is stable and displays content properly. However, it is slow, does not do push for Gmail, will not let me see real-time badges, and has very little customization options.

Overall winner, Outlook, then ioS Mail. Others don't compete.
 
All of which you must provide your email password, and every email traverses their servers.

This is the detail I was expecting to find mentioned, but not at all... Tell me which ones of these don't act as a proxy by reading and monetizing my own inbox!
 
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Huge oversight by Macrumors to not include Outlook in this list. Can I even take your reviews seriously now? Shame shame shame.
 
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I have tried most of these apps, and each have flaws, but agree that Outlook does some of the best job. The main issue for all of these is how they handle Yahoo emails (don't ask why I still keep a Yahoo address). Connection to Yahoo servers is excruciatingly slow, and a lot of spam goes through. Therefore, my main criteria for apps are how fast they connect, how they show updated badges in real time, and how they display content. Another key factor is quickly understanding who is cc-ed or not, without this taking half of the screen.

AirMail has issues with formatting some emails with pictures, where the text is unreadably small if there is a picture included. It also tends to be a little slow to update. If many people are cc-ed, it takes too much space on the screen.

Edison has the best real time badge update, but it completely fails with Yahoo accounts and jumps all around, going to the top of the page while loading content and crashing a lot. I reported the issues many times but the app is unusable in my hands.

I do not care for the Spark interface not taking advantage of the entire screen.

Outlook is amazing at parsing important mail from other listings, and is overall the most solid. I have my work account there.

I continue to use iOS Mail for privacy for my main personal mail accounts, and because it is stable and displays content properly. However, it is slow, does not do push for Gmail, will not let me see real-time badges, and has very little customization options.

Overall winner, Outlook, then ioS Mail. Others don't compete.

Yeah, Yahoo seems to have an issue on the native iOS app. Its just slow. They blame Apple and apple blames them. Yahoo support even had the audacity to tell me to switch to the yahoo mail app. No thanks.
 
Pretty sad apple is not offering the best email,. Even sadder they dont have a iOS app to your iCloud account so you dont poop up your device memory with mail you cant get rid of without delating it across the platform.
 
I'd rather like to know which email client is a 'real' email client instead of a frontend for a cloud based service that asks you to provide the login data for your email accounts in order to collect (and scan?) the emails for you *sigh*

Oh and by the way: supporting IMAP idle extensions
 
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My favourite for a long time has been Unibox on iOS and on Mac. The way it sorts out emails by contact might not suit most people, but I find it a great way to keep things organised. Only problem is that it basically hasn't been updated in years, just compatibly updates when iOS or osx breaks something, and I worry that it will stop working at some point
 
LOL, you forgot the best one, the included apple mail app, it just works, it's clean and simple, and you don't have to install a single thing!
I've tried a bunch on this list and come back to Mail every time. If you take the time to learn the ins and outs of some of its features, it actually does quite a lot. And it doesn't involve handing my entire email account over to some unknown third party developer.

Honestly the only big thing I wish Mail had was a way to get Gmail pushed to it directly instead of fetching it periodically -- and that might be more a limitation Google is imposing anyway.
 
I have tried most of these apps, and each have flaws, but agree that Outlook does some of the best job. The main issue for all of these is how they handle Yahoo emails (don't ask why I still keep a Yahoo address). Connection to Yahoo servers is excruciatingly slow, and a lot of spam goes through. Therefore, my main criteria for apps are how fast they connect, how they show updated badges in real time, and how they display content. Another key factor is quickly understanding who is cc-ed or not, without this taking half of the screen.

AirMail has issues with formatting some emails with pictures, where the text is unreadably small if there is a picture included. It also tends to be a little slow to update. If many people are cc-ed, it takes too much space on the screen.

Edison has the best real time badge update, but it completely fails with Yahoo accounts and jumps all around, going to the top of the page while loading content and crashing a lot. I reported the issues many times but the app is unusable in my hands.

I do not care for the Spark interface not taking advantage of the entire screen.

Outlook is amazing at parsing important mail from other listings, and is overall the most solid. I have my work account there.

I continue to use iOS Mail for privacy for my main personal mail accounts, and because it is stable and displays content properly. However, it is slow, does not do push for Gmail, will not let me see real-time badges, and has very little customization options.

Overall winner, Outlook, then ioS Mail. Others don't compete.
I keep a Yahoo account as well, but I almost never go there. It’s my “one time validation” email address that I use.
 
Can someone answer this for me please? I would love to just use the native iOS mail app, but can you delete a message and have the option to archive too? When I try to use it, I have one or the other. Some messages I want to save and archive without it being in the inbox. Others I want to delete.
 
I see a lot of love for Outlook. I can agree with that however, the big reason I dropped it, I couldn't figure out how to sync my google calendars with it. The only calendar I could sync was whatever calendar that was default with the google account I setup. Nothin else that was subscribed within that account.

Anyone have suggestions?
 
I think Apple did a good job interfacing their built-in Email with Microsoft Exchange. For some reason, Apple and Microsoft seemed to have cooperated nicely on that integration.

I prefer to use Apple's built in mail versus a third party email application.

Same here, with all my accounts for work and personal, I continue to use Mail app on iOS rather than 3rd party, I do have the Outlook app as well for one of my emails that I just like to keep in a separate app, but for me its been great with just the stock app that I haven't had the need to explore 3rd party options.

Curious what the 3rd party apps offer convenience wise that people really want.

Would love some feedback from someone that manages 5-10+ email accounts from various services for work/personal/business etc.
 
Nine email is good alternative for Exchange but still needs a bit of work. a Co-Worker has on his Android phone and it does real activesync (not requiring a middle-man server like Outlook or Spark). It even does shared exchange calendars, and new email notifications per folder. Unfortunately the iOS version needs a bit more updates because it does not yet do shared exchange calendars. I contacted support and they said they are merging the Android version with iOS.

http://www.9folders.com/product/
 
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Outlook on iOS is by far and away the best. Makes Apple’s own effort look poor.

No, not at all. Outlook doesn't even have simple things like 3D Touch Peek (which I use ALL time since you can then either swipe up or sideways for different actions), HTML Signature support or even the ability to mark an individual email in a thread as Unread.

The built-in Mail app is outstanding for my needs. Supports Exchange Push, gestures, 3D Touch and is the best at having the mail "ready" and already downloaded when you open an email. The other apps still need to download the email, even if you have background app refresh on.
 
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