Monday, December 1, 2014

Best email apps for iPhone: How to get to inbox zero!

Looking for the best iPhone apps to replace the built-in Mail app? Email is an important part of both our professional and personal lives. Nowadays most people have multiple inboxes to manage and lots of messages to sort through. While the built-in Mail app has a lot of features and the home-turf advantage, it doesn't have everything. Luckily, that's why there are lots of alternatives to choose from in the App Store. But which mail apps for iPhone are the absolute best to choose from?

Dispatch

Dispatch is not only one of the most versatile and powerful inbox apps, it supports a plethora of other third party apps, including TextExpander, Pocket, Evernote, Things, Omnifocus, and many more. Dispatch also supports email aliases, image attachments, Touch ID, and much more. Although Dispatch doesn't support native push, it supports fetch and badges which may be enough for some.

You'll be hard pressed to find an email app that works as well with other apps and services as Dispatch does, as long as you can do without push notifications and snooze options.

Mailbox

Mailbox by Dropbox lets you quickly swipe messages to archive, delete, snooze, or file them to a list. When marking for later, Mailbox allows you to decide when you'd like messages to return to your inbox. This means you can focus on only the emails that are important to you right at that moment. Mailbox also has Dropbox integration, making attachment upload easy, and supports push notifications. A Mac version of Mailbox is also available in beta and is already available for iPad.

If you use Gmail or iCloud and rely heavily on Dropbox for email attachments, Mailbox is a solid option.

Boxer

Boxer, like many others, is gesture driven and allows you to quickly swipe your way to inbox zero. Boxer, however, has support for to-do lists and many more advanced features other clients can't touch. Boxer's dashboard feature gives you a quick look at everything you have in your inbox and other sections of your mailbox. This translates to you being able to quickly see what needs your attention and what can wait until later. Boxer supports pretty much every email account you could have with the exception of POP3 accounts.

If you like clean interfaces like Mailbox but want Exchange support or more advanced features, Boxer is what you want.

Hop

Hop is a wonderful email app that throws away everything we've come to expect with traditional email. Instead, Hop transforms your emails into conversations just like you'd see when launching an instant messaging or texting app. Hop supports Google, Yahoo, AOL, and iCloud accounts and offers native push notifications that are customizable on a per thread basis. Other features unique to Hop are groups and calling between you and other Hop users.

For a unique email app that transforms the way you think and view email, combined with powerful workgroup options, check out Hop.

Triage

Triage isn't based around traditional mailboxes, folders, and message lists. Instead, Triage displays your inbox messages as a stack of cards. The idea is simple: swipe a mail card up to archive it, and down to keep it. If you have the time and inclination to do more, you can tap on a card and get more traditional mail tools, like reply and forward, but only when and if you want to. Triage currently supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, iCloud, and many other 3rd party mail clients through IMAP.

While it shouldn't be most people's primary mail app, Triage can help you get to the bottom of your inbox in no time.

Your pick for best email app for iPhone?

We know that everyone's email workflow is very different and on some levels, quite personal. While these are the choices we think will cater to the widest number of users, we're interested to know what clients you're using, why, and how they're improved your productivity and ability to manage your inbox. Let us know in the comments below!

Note: Originally published, June 2014. Updated, December 2014.








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