OnMail — Fast & Simple Email
Sending out mixed messages
Free (IAPs) From onmail.com Made for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Needs iOS/iPadOS 10.0 or later
OnMail’s app is billed as “email built for today”. It comes with a host of thoughtful features but it really needs a little refinement going forward.
Starting on the inbox view, you will find a few neat tricks. Swiping from left to right on a message gives the usual options to mark it as unread or trash it. Swipe the other way, though, and you can move it to the “Done” folder, which is a repository for mail you have dealt with but do not want to delete. It’s a great way to keep
your inbox tidy without viciously purging it.
There are other nifty inbox features. You can approve unknown senders before their messages enter your inbox. Attachments are popped out below their associated emails. Tracking pixels are automatically removed. However, there is no way to add flags and starred indicators, which feels like an oversight to us.
Most of the key tools you need are housed in a swipe–up tab at the bottom of the app. Swipe up on your inbox and you can search your mail in natural language. You can also jump to various standard folders or OnMail’s AI– powered “smart folders”. These contain travel documents, parcel tracking details, and more. Leave the tab down and you can switch between your Primary inbox view and any others you have added (annoyingly, right now you can only add new sections from OnMail’s web app, not its iOS app).
Tap the Other button on the tab and you get a taste of Preview Mode, which samples
your newsletters and promotional emails in a feed. It is a great way to quickly browse through messages, but OnMail misses a trick by not letting you swipe to deal with them. It slows down what is meant to be a quick viewing mode.
The swipe–up tab is also visible when you view an individual email. Here, you can reply, mark the message as done or unread, or access more actions like moving the message to spam from the three-dot menu. Swipe up and OnMail shows the email thread’s participants; tap one and you see their profile, along with any attachments and messages they have sent you (think the search feature in your Messages).
Sending emails is easy and fuss–free. Backing out halfway through composing does not prompt you to save the message to drafts but it should save. However, we encountered a bug where our drafts only appeared in the web app, not in the iOS app, which is a bit annoying and troublesome.
OnMail is totally ad–free. To make money, it offers paid subscriptions. We reviewed the Personal plan ($49.99 per year), which has extra storage, the ability to password protect files, and support for custom domains. Frustratingly, importing third-party accounts is also locked behind this paywall, which we really feel should be a free feature. There’s also a $99.99 per year Professional plan.
OnMail is a promising email app with some great features built-in for free. It needs a little tweaking, but its main issue is that you have to pay to bring your existing inboxes with you.
THE BOTTOM LINE. Full of great ideas but needs a little fine–tuning. ALEX BLAKE