Once or twice a year I end up trying out as many iPhone email apps as I can. I’m still in search of the perfect email app, but none have ever stood above the rest to any significant degree. I’m always picking the least offensive email app instead of finding one that I love.

The following is my loosely edited collection of notes, taken while testing each of the apps with my Fastmail account.

Airmail

• There is a section in settings for configuring message actions, but that changes what is displayed through the ellipses menu in the upper-right when viewing a message. I would have expected it to change the ellipses menu at the bottom of the screen, which seems like where the app encourages you to live when dealing with emails. Honestly, I don’t even know why that upper-right ellipses menu even exists. If they want to make sure you always have access to all of the actions, list the ones I’ve checked in settings and then give me a “More Actions” button to view the rest.
• I love that I can fully configure the Message Detail Actions, which is what the app displays at the bottom of the screen when viewing an email. For example, I hate having a visible trash button because I never move emails to the trash, I only ever archive messages.
• I wish the “Undo Archive” banner didn’t shift the location of the Message Detail Actions. It makes it more difficult to archive messages in quick secession because you have to be conscious that the Undo button is going to be located where the Archive button was previously.
• “Draft” is the best app icon option. By a lot.
• I wish it was faster. It seems like, the time between tapping the archive button and the archive process completing is longer than it should be.

Big Mail

• I love the look of “The Latest” — the inbox tab — in its empty state. No distracting graphics or abrupt text. It just displays a simple gray icon and “You’re all up to date”.
• The app icon looks a little vulgar.
• I have no idea what the Big Mail subscription actually does. The upgrade screen simply says “Unlock all of Big Mail”, but I can’t find what features that includes.
• looks like the subscription allows you to actually read email. It would be nice if that was listed on the subscription page.
• I don’t get a ton of email, so I really don’t like having my messages split into multiple buckets. That seems like where this app shines. Because of that, I doubt it will be a great option for me.
• I hate the way emails in each of the inboxes are presented as cards by default. I prefer the list option, which provides better information density.
• The message view is really slick, but I don’t like that the message actions (archive, reply, etc.) aren’t omnipresent. You have to tap on an ellipses menu or scroll to the bottom of the message to view them. This feels like a massive speed bump in my workflow.
• It’s expensive. At $9.99 per month or $77.99 each year, you need to care a lot about email to justify the cost.
• The message view on iPad is bad. There’s not enough margin at the top and bottom of the screen for message content. And the first time I opened a message on iPad, the action buttons didn’t appear at the bottom at all and the X button didn’t seem to work — I had to force quit the app to get back to the message list. Such a bad first impression.

Boxer

• Good looking app.
• I don’t like having calendars in my email app. I prefer to use a separate app to manage calendar events.
• If you reply to a message, there is a notice that appears at the bottom of the screen — to notify that it was sent. The issue is that this covers up the message actions at the bottom of the screen. You have to wait for that notification to disappear before you can archive the original message.
• There’s nothing extraordinary about it. Nothing that draws me to use it. It’s just fine.

Newton

• The best app icon of the bunch, by far.
• I wish there was an option to hide some of the message actions. I don’t ever want to see the delete button, for example.
• It features tabs along the bottom for Starred, Unread, and Zenbox that I will never end up using. Ever. Like I’ve mentioned for other apps, I don’t get enough email to make these specialized inboxes worthwhile at all.
• The app feels really fast.
• $50 a year is steep, but not necessarily a deal breaker.
• I’m nervous about using it long term. The app has had a rocky history — nearly shutting down twice — and although it’s easy enough to switch to a new app (thank you, IMAP), I don’t want them to end up shutting down with half a year of my subscription left or something.
• There doesn’t seem to be a way to do quote replies in-line — no way to increase the quote level for text. I don’t do this too often, but in the rare cases when I do, it’s incredibly important to me.

Microsoft Outlook

• Not too fond of the colored toolbar along the top. It’s just a bit too much for my taste.
• Another app that prominently features calendar support — this one in the bottom toolbar. I’d prefer if I could just disable that. I’d rather use a separate app for managing and viewing calendar events.
• I don’t like that the account sidebar is always visible on iPad. I only plan to use a single account, so this is just unnecessary visual clutter.
• No customization options for the message actions buttons and there is always a delete button shown — something I never plan to use.
• I’m not fond of message actions at the top of the screen. They’re more reachable at the bottom and it makes for a better workflow when you’re archiving messages in quick secession, since your hand isn’t obscuring the message content when the button’s at the bottom.
• Does it even support background refresh for IMAP accounts? I was only able to get it to check for new messages manually.

Apple Mail

• I wish they did something more creative with their empty list states. Simply displaying “No Mail” is a little lame.
• I wish you could completely customize the message actions toolbar, but at least you can replace the trash button with one that archives.
• It feels really fast. I can just plow through archiving a number of messages like it’s nothing.
• On the iPad, if you open an email from another folder — Archive, for example — and then switch back to your inbox, there’s no way to close the message you were viewing. It will remain in the right-hand panel until you receive more messages and archive them. This is annoying, to say the least.
• I really missed having a snooze feature, which has become an important part of my workflows.

Canary Mail

• It has a weird bug where, if you are viewing the last email in your inbox and tap the archive button, the animation will display like the email is being archived, but you’ll still be viewing it. You tap archive again, the animation will display again, and then you’ll be pushed back to your inbox. As someone who tries to maintain inbox zero, this is irritating.
• Another good app icon. Probably not as good as Newton’s, but I’m giving Newton bonus points for not having a blue icon like every other email app in the world.
• I really like how wide the message list is on the iPad. It takes up a bit more width than the other apps, but I think it’s pretty cozy.
• I wish I could customize the message actions when viewing an email.

Edison Mail

• There’s some concern about user privacy. They admittedly sell aggregated user data related to online purchases. I don’t want to use an email app that engages in this type of practice, but was willing to give it a try to have a more complete picture of the iOS email app market.
• I wish there were more options for snoozing email. You can only select specific times — you can’t snooze it for, let’s say, three hours like you can with other email apps. This limits the snooze features usability for me.
• I didn’t have to add any of IMAP or SMTP settings, Edison saw that I was using Fastmail and just set the correct settings. I appreciate that quite a bit.
• It offers assistant features to give you a heads up about refunds, deliveries for online orders, bills that are due, and more. I turned all of them off. I can’t imagine actually wanting them.
• It offers a customizable message actions bar, which is fantastic.

Polymail

• After setting up the app with my Fastmail account, the app icon was badged with a “3”, despite having no messages in my inbox at all. Not a good sign.
• Turns out, I actually did have three messages in my inbox, but the app wasn’t displaying them anywhere other than the icon badge. I was able to see them when I logged in to Fastmail from the browser. I couldn’t even get the email to display after force quitting the app. That’s an absolutely deal breaker. I don’t know how I could confidently rely on an email app after a bug like this.
• I got an email from Polymail after I had already deleted the app, revoked access for the app password, and moved on to the next app. I’m not even going to bother giving it another try — at least not in this current testing spree. The app gave me an unread badge, but the inbox just gave me an empty message. If there was some weird indexing/process happening, why wouldn’t there be an indication of that? Again, I just can’t trust the app after this.

Fastmail

• I don’t use the calendar, notes, or files features, I wish I could hide those in the bottom toolbar.
• I wish I could customize the message actions when viewing an email. It currently displays a delete icon, which I never plan to use.
• After archiving a message, it sends you back to the inbox list. I would rather the app automatically open the next email to streamline the workflow.

Spark

• Customizable sidebar, customizable message actions, opens the next email when archiving, and customizable swipe actions. All fantastic.
• I wish there was a way to disable the calendar icon. I prefer using a separate app to manage my calendars, but at least it’s a small icon in the top toolbar, which isn’t too prominent.
• There’s just nothing exciting about it.

Conclusion

I’m sticking with Spark. Although there’s nothing exceptional about it, the app supports everything I need it to and it’s just rock solid. It’s the app that has the least annoyances and doesn’t require any subscription pricing unless you need access to their premium features.

As a bit of an aside, it’s amazing that there isn’t a single iOS email app that supports Markdown — at least not that I’m aware of. That would be such a killer feature for me. Even if it only supported bold, italic, blockquotes, and unordered lists, that would cover just about everything I’d want it to.

Federico Viticci, writing for MacStories:

Airmail showed that it was possible to build an email app for power users on mobile devices – asking for a fair price in the process – but I couldn’t switch to it as my full-time client yet.

That’s changing with today’s update to Airmail for iOS, which I’ve been using as my only email client on the iPhone and iPad for the past several weeks. In addition to an iPad app – which mostly follows in the footsteps of its iPhone counterpart in terms of UI and navigation choices – Airmail 1.1 brings powerful new features such as saved searches, customizable keyboard shortcuts, support for send later and read receipts, and more.

I also switched to Airmail on all of my devices after iPad support was added in version 1.1. But I’ve realized that I’m not in love with the app. It’s good and I continue to use it, but only because there isn’t anything better on the market. And I’ve tried everything from Dispatch to Outlook — Airmail is as close to great as I’ve been able to find.

Ben Ubois, founder of Feedbin, writing about the service’s newest feature:

You can now receive email newsletters in Feedbin.

To use this feature, go to the settings page and find your secret Feedbin email address. Use this email address whenever you sign up for an email newsletter. Anything sent to it will show up as a feed in Feedbin, grouped by sender.

There’s been a recent trend of tech-focused weblogs publishing email newsletters with exclusive content. I’ve signed up for a few of them, but I don’t really read any of them. The problem is that my email app isn’t the environment where I want to read that type of long-form prose.

When I open Airmail (my new email client of choice), I just want to check for important messages, take action where necessary, and move on. I certainly don’t want to read a couple thousand words on the newest app release. I do want to read about it, but not in my email app.

And that’s why this new Feedbin feature is brilliant. It helps keep your email inbox clean and puts the well-crafted newsletters in an app that’s better suited for that type of text. And it’s also the sort of feature that has me thinking about switching.

My current RSS backend is a self-hosted installation of Fever, which I’ve been using for six or seven years. It works well enough, but it’s become painfully obvious that it isn’t going to be supported for much longer. The last update was released in September 2014 to add support for the latest iPhones’ screen size alongside a few bug fixes.

I still love Fever — its “Hot” category, which displays popular links based on how many of the feeds you follow have pointed to it, remains as one of my favorite RSS features of all time. But the truth is, I don’t interact directly with Fever much anymore. The vast majority of my time reading RSS feeds is from my iOS devices where Reeder is my app of choice. The only time I use Fever directly is when I’m on my Mac — which is a becoming a rarity — or when I’m subscribing to a new feed using Fever’s bookmarklet.

There isn’t much compelling me to use Fever anymore. I like the idea of self-hosting, but not if the software isn’t actively maintained. I like Fever’s Hot category, but rarely use it because of Reeder’s shoddy support for the feature. And other services offer modern user interfaces and newer, more advanced features — like support for email newsletters — that are beginning to pique my interest.

I don’t know if email newsletter support is the feature that will push me to sign up for Feedbin, but there’s definitely a chink in Fever’s armor. The software has fallen behind its competitors and the rise of native RSS client apps has obfuscated the web-based backend almost entirely.

Given that Reeder supports both Fever and Feedbin, I don’t even need to get used to a new user interface. Once I sign up for an account, upload my OPML file, and login on Reeder, I can continue on business as usual. I suppose the only place for me to go from here is to take a look at Feedbin’s other unique features to see if it’s actually worth making the switch.