Slickly on message
Third-party apps can help prevent you from being chained to your email inbox, writes David Behrens.
Just because you use Gmail for your messages, there’s no reason to stick to the same old app. The same goes for Outlook, Hotmail and any other platform you care to name. But Gmail is the most persuasive email network, because its software comes bundled with every Android phone and can’t easily be removed. It means most of us never even look for an alternative.
It’s only when you stop to consider what it doesn’t do natively that you begin to wonder if an alternative app might suit you better.
This is particularly true if you have several email accounts that you want to display together on your home screen. Gmail requires a separate widget for each one – but some of its rivals are a step ahead, with unified inboxes that work across multiple platforms at the same time.
The best of these, perhaps surprisingly, is Microsoft Outlook, which in its smartphone implementation looks nothing like the lumbering PC version beloved of office IT managers in the 1990s. The phone app was actually created by a small start-up company called Acompli, which Microsoft acquired several years ago in order to rebrand as its own.
Outlook for Android and iPhone replaces your regular email app – and your calendar, if you want – with a similarlooking interface which can connect to virtually any email account, no matter where it’s hosted. This means you can display your Gmail inboxes side by side with accounts you may have on Office365, iCloud, Yahoo or anywhere else, without interfering with their settings in any way. You can view any combination of accounts together or separate each one, both on your home screen and within the app itself. So there’s no need to check through multiple windows to see if you have new mail.
Edison Mail does pretty much exactly the same thing, and is also available for both Apple and Android phones. Other apps like Aqua, BlueMail and Spark are also out there; some have design quirks which you may like or not, but they’re all free to try and easy to remove later. Among the features to look for are customisable notifications for different accounts, senders or types of message, and the facility to “focus” your inbox by prioritising messages the app deems to be important.
None of these apps compromises your ability to synchronize messages between your phone and computers. All the changes are made on the servers of your email providers and are replicated automatically across all apps and devices. This is even true of Outlook, whose original PC version relied on storing messages to your local hard drive. A third-party product also does not preclude you from returning to the native app at any time, should you need to; it’s merely another portal to view the same information.
Some apps – Edison Mail is a case in point – set out their stall on being able to root out spam and malicious messages by means of artificial intelligence, and to unsubscribe you automatically from future correspondence. Gmail is pretty good at doing this already, but other platforms are less so, and in any case, a second filter is no bad thing.
However, unsubscribing is not always the best option, since doing so alerts the sender to the fact that your inbox is live and therefore susceptible. Marking a message as spam and not replying at all is safer.
There are so many junk messages around these days that it’s easy to forget that email is supposed to be a convenience, not a burden. One of these third-party apps might just free you from being chained to your inbox.
You can view any combination of accounts together or separate each one.