Finding the perfect email app...
A tale of trying to find the perfect email app...
Over the years I have used and tried several email clients and email services. I've ran my own email servers and used services like Google Gmail, Rackspace email, Office 365 and more. While I like each one of them for their features, the user interface or the availability of mobile apps, something is always lacking.
In October of 2014 Google released an invitation only to their new service, Inbox By Google. I was fortunate enough to get one of the early invitations and see what the new craze was all about.
After a few days of setting up and using Inbox I was starting to fall in love with the new features and loved obtaining inbox zero. At the time, I did not realize I needed a "snooze" feature for my email, but it quickly became one of my goto features that I used often.
Throughout the years, I used Inbox as my main email client. Different companies that I worked mainly utilized Google Suite or Office 365 so I was able to keep using Inbox for the majority of my email usage. That is, until I wanted more advanced features that Inbox was lacking.
Inbox was great, it allowed me to manage incoming email and deal with the notifications quickly and efficiently. As a Technology Executive, I needed the ability to categorize the emails, label them, search for them, snooze them, delete and archive them, respond with different email signatures and more. Inbox was focused on a clean interface that hide most of those features. So after 3 years of using the service, I was off to find something that fit my needs.
I went back to using Apple Mail, Google Gmail Web Interface, and Microsoft Outlook as my primary tools to manage my email. These were always ok and never great.
I stumbled across an app called Airmail. Airmail had a lot of feature that Inbox did and I tried it out. After several weeks of using Airmail, I like it. It replaced my slew of clients and it had features that I liked. However, it soon came to an end.
Something about Airmail didn't feel right. It could have been a setting or a setup that I didn't have configured, or it was the default way the app handled Gmail. The way it managed folders, snoozed emails was not inviting when I had to login to the Gmail web interface. There were extra folders created during the IMAP Sync with Airmail and my web interface did not mimic the app. This made me drop the app as a client.
If we fast forward through all the emails I've had since then, it's been a little bit of a pain. However, I've always stuck to the Apple Mail app as a good default. It's nice, familiar and gets the job done. For the most part.
Recently, and by that I mean yesterday 11/26/2020, I found a new email app Spark. I set it up on my iPhone and within minutes started navigating around. It felt comfortable, it felt nice. So I set it up on my Mac this morning and within a few minutes, the app had synced all the settings and accounts from my phone over to the Mac App. It was awesome. I was up and running.
It's too soon to tell how long it will last, but I'm going to be using this over the next few weeks to see how it works for my setup and flow.
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