Newton Mail for iOS and Mac is Back for $50/Year

[MacRumors]

Back in September, iOS and macOS email app Newton were shut down, much to the disappointment of Newton Mail enthusiasts. At the time, Newton parent company CloudMagic said that though the company tried various business models, it wasn't able to figure out how to maintain profitability and growth over the long term.

A couple of months later, Essential, a smartphone company owned by Android co-creator Andy Rubin, purchased CloudMagic and the Newton app. At the time, it wasn't known what Essential planned to do with the Newton app.

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The company's plan became clear this week when a new version of the Newton email app showed up in the App Store and the Mac App Store, bringing it back to life. The Newton apps were never actually pulled, but they hadn't been updated for months and were becoming unusable due to bugs and crashes.

Since December, CloudMagic and Essential have been working to bring Newton Mail back to life, and there are interface improvements and new features like deleting a single email in a thread, resizing the Mac compose window, adding emails to OmniFocus, and other enhancements to the compose window on Mac.

Newton Mail has also had its pricing restructured. At the time it was shut down, CloudMagic was charging $100 per year upfront for Newton, which may be a major reason why it ultimately was an unsustainable business model. It's difficult to get people to pay $100 for an email app.

Newton Mail is now priced at $49.99 per year, which is still expensive, but more reasonable than $100. There's also a 14 day free trial so you can give it a go before downloading.

The app has a simple, clean interface and features like read receipts, send later, inbox filtering for newsletters and other junk mail, snooze, app integration, undo send, recap for notifying you about emails waiting for a reply, one-click unsubscribe, and push notifications, all features that many users like.

Of course, with any third-party email app, it's always worth investigating privacy policies to see what companies are doing with your data. Newton says it may share aggregated or de-identified information with third parties and works with third-party social platforms like Facebook to serve targeted ads unless you opt out, which is something to be aware of.

MacRumors videographer Dan is a big fan of Newton Mail and it's his go-to email app, so make sure to watch the video above to see Newton Mail in action. And if you're looking for other email app alternatives, we recently rounded up some of the best iOS email apps in the App Store.

Article Link: Newton Mail for iOS and Mac is Back for $50/Year

 

[n-evo]

Yeah. I’ll just save myself the $50 and use Mail instead. Thanks, though!

 

[lucaspttrsn]

no. no one in their right mind pays $50 a year to check their emails. what is wrong with you..

 

[Smearbrick]

50 bucks and they share information with social platforms if you don’t opt out. Where do I sign up?

 

[mdbradigan]

$50 / year is absurd. I want MASSIVE improvements over any current system for that price. i would pay it.... but the feature set for Newton is... a different color? What's their selling point, exactly? How bizarre.

 

[abrantes09]

I just want Apple to revamp the current mail app with a new design and improved/added features in iOS 13. Other than that, what I have now is easier, and possibly better, than $50 bucks to read an email.

 

[nutmac]

From the App Store:

If you still have your Newton account, just log in using your Newton username and password.

So an app shuts down more than 4 months ago and I can login again with my old credential? Does that mean my other old data is also intact?

If old data is still intact, it shows total disregard for user privacy. I am not taking any risk.

 

[celo48]

When there is Spark for free which is an amazing mail app, I wouldn’t even use others if they paid me to use it

 

[LogicalApex]

50 bucks and they share information with social platforms if you don’t opt out. Where do I sign up?

This is what stood out to me the most. I would expect such an expensive email application to have the strongest privacy policy.

AirMail has a strong privacy policy and no subscription model.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Their 'Terms of Service' and Privacy Policy is terrible. There isn't much privacy left if you use Newton. They used to have much better policies. They sold their souls to the new company. I can't recommend them anymore.

 

[now i see it]

They didn't learn their lesson last time w $100/ yr app, so they're trying again at $50. F o r a email app.

History will repeat itself. Nobody is going to shell out $50/yr for an email app when there's plenty of great ones already available for free.

 

[Raineer]

no. no one in their right mind pays $50 a year to check their emails. what is wrong with you..

Fastmail is worth it - $50/year for a lot of features and a whole lot more.

Newton, not so much.

 

[pat500000]

Sounds like another shutdown to me.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Dan,
Not once did you mention the importance of their new policies. You owe it to the readers and viewers to do a better job of covering that aspect, versus praising the old Newton.

 

[StellarVixen]

I smell a big fail incoming.

They will be the victims of their own greed.

 

[confirmed]

I'm terribly sad about this. Newton was a fantastic Mail app, absolutely worth the $39/year I had originally paid. When I heard it was back at $50, I was thrilled even at the higher cost.. Until I read their updated Privacy Policy.

Having gone from:

"All the information we collect from you is only used to give you the best possible experience using Newton. We don’t run ads inside the product or sell data to make money. We’ve built a good product and charge our users a subscription to run the business."
[Old Privacy Policy]

to

"We may work with third-party social platforms, such as Facebook, to serve ads to you as part of a customized campaign, unless you notify us that you prefer not to have information about you used in this way by sending an email to notices@newtonhq.com indicating the email address you wish to have removed from customized ad campaigns.
[Current Privacy Policy]

..is absurd for a product that charges any fees.

 

[Heineken]

Dan is annoying.

 

[Col4bin]

So, what exactly does this email app offer over standard Mail or Gmail? Anything good?

 

[Apple_Robert]

I am waiting on Pigeonmail to release their new product this month. No data mining, no Google or Facebook analytics etc. no serving ads or selling your info to third parties. They don't track anything you do.

 

[rodpascoe]

I am waiting on Pigeonmail to release their new product this month. No data mining, no Google or Facebook analytics etc. no serving ads or selling your info to third parties. They don't track anything you do.

Another app that will struggle to charge in a market full of great free alternatives.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Another app that will struggle to charge in a market full of great free alternatives.

True. But if their commitment to privacy rhetoric is matched by their actions and developer service, I am willing to help them, provided I agree with the fine print.

 

[Stevez67]

Hahahaha @ paying for an email app. And one that's going to serve ads to paid subscribers. That would be like paying postage due for junk snail mail. Hell will have frozen over for decades before I pay for an email app. And again, privacy policies are worthless when greed dictates higher earnings.

 

[martyjmclean]

Why would anyone pay for an email app when Mail and Outlook are free?

 

[nt5672]

I just want Apple to revamp the current mail app with a new design and improved/added features in iOS 13. Other than that, what I have now is easier, and possibly better, than $50 bucks to read an email.

The problem with Apple mail, much like all things Apple these days, is that Apple's design-to use case is a teenager that mostly tweets, instagrams, whispers, snapchats, etc. and has very little use for a full featured mail app. Especially these days where teenagers want their social exchanges deleted immediately. Apple mail is good for a half dozen emails per day, but not much more.

 

[Kabeyun]

It all comes down to whether or not you trust [non-Apple entity x] with your private messages. I sure as hell don’t, not even for free.