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12th Apr, 2024
Become smarter at handling your email inbox with these tool picks. These email management tools offer ways to get closer to the magic Inbox Zero.
A clean, distraction-free inbox, in under 5 minutes
SaneBox clears the clutter, so you can focus on your highest priorities and get more done.
Email productivity apps are distant cousins to Gmail and Outlook, but can help us be much more productive than their older, larger-sized family members.
Email clients and apps have been around for a long time, with apps like MailBox rising as a star in 2013 which was acquired by the lovely Dropbox, and making people go beyond the basics of email that the staple tools provide.
As we all know, we spend a lot of time on email.
According to this study, we spend 23% of our workday handling email - hence why people are on the hunt for a more attractive way to view, manage, and send emails. So picking the perfect email productivity tool is fundamental to managing them all.
Here's all the choices we'd go with for an email app in 2024:
These are the factors we used to pick the email clients and tools we did:
A third-party email client is software that allows you to view, manage, and send emails.
Think of 3rd party email clients as a layer of skin over the core email. Many of them use an experience like Gmail, Outlook or Apple Mail to build from as a provider and then produce custom features, looks and speed to help the user fall in love with their app above defaults.
Here's the ones we'd recommend to most people reading this:
We've not just curated these, but reviewed all these email apps below for your picks
For productivity, Superhuman works very well.
Superhuman is for sure one of the most premium email apps on the market, priced at $30 per month, and out of the budget for many people who use email lightly, but it packs a punch. From using Superhuman and our past review, it is the fastest of the experiences we've used loading, sending, and allowing you to manage emails in the fastest way we've seen from reviewing email apps.
It does this using keyboard shortcuts that allow you to browse Superhuman and create calendar events, manage email, and organize with speed making your email productivity much better. Whilst this shaves off time across your week, you begin to think about your inbox as less of a challenge and more of a clear-out. The apps on both Android and iOS are fast and snappy and still come with gestures, touch orientated, that allow you to clear email and handle it better on mobile.
The only letdown for Superhuman email is pricing and education.
Pricing for many is very high and we'd probably only say to people that it works for those who associate their time with the output (money) side of things - eg. you deal with sponsors on email all day long and spend maybe 4-5 hours there daily. We think this is a healthier approach when looking at Superhuman and tools in the price range (Missive) and will allow you to make a better decision on how it impacts your email productivity.
If you're in the market for a fast email app and you spend between 2-3 hours a day, we'd be inclined for you to take a look at Superhuman as your next email app. If you don't spend that long, probably worth exploring the other less expensive options.
If you're shying away from the larger costs of Superhuman, but still want that clean, reliable way to handle emails, we think Spark Mail is a worth a look at.
The Readdle based company, well-known for their productivity apps like PDFElement and Calendars, present an email app with credibility and a brilliant reliability. For many Spark presents a simple, yet effective way to handle their email and with a good free plan too.
Now with more recent AI features, Spark Mail presents a focused experience that combines filtering for your inbox, smart sorting, cross-platform availability and a free subscription. Unified inbox, sync between devices and smart inbox are all core and staple features. The prioritization features are more part of the premium subscription.
Spark is one of the best all round email clients on the market, connecting to all the popular services and backed by the well-known, well-loved Readdle who make software like Calendars. We'd recommend it for all-round day-to-day email management.
A superb all-rounder for someone looking to upgrade their Gmail basic use and someone looking to get a more unified view of their inbox with some features for inbox management.
Missive is a great option for solo users but more so for team users who are growing and want to collaborate on email as they go out. Missive is what's called a "collaborative email" where you and a team can work together on email, comment and even assign tasks too.
Missive does a brilliant job at a few things - a fast and functional inbox, unbelievably good customization in settings for how Missive looks and works, great team collaboration functions like comments, tasks, assignments and powerful integrations with plenty of apps even apps like Todoist, OpenAI and more.
Francesco from our team used Missive in the past and found it super helpful. It is one of the email apps that if you scaled your team, adding people isn't invasive and there's ways that you can assign people to certain emails and collaborate well together. Equally it can used as a solo email client for one user.
Missive is a very different option on this list, but if you're serious about email and spend lots of time in their as a team replying to support tickets, or handling customer issues or maybe want to get your workflow sorted. Missive could be for you. As a solo user, it is cheaper than Superhuman but still very steep as a solo email application.
Spike Mail wants to replace Slack and your email app all at the same time. A combo of conversational like messaging as you would see in WhatApp messages and email like threads is a strange thing to get used to, but Spike is a new take on email management.
Spike is what they call a "unified team collaboration tool" which in less fancy terms means they want you to do everything in here that relates to collaboration. So Spike handles your email, chats, notes and meetings now - this allows you to better manage things without jumping between applications. Before we move on, let's explain that in terms of features.
So in Spike, everything looks like a chat app but you can send emails, chat with team members if they use Spike too (in real-time), create notes and documents that you can (with team) collaborate on in real-time, same goes with meeting notes, and even do video and voice calls too.
Spike basically don't want you to ever leave.
Spike is a fully kitted workspace. If you're going to use Spike for email only, it will be sort of being like only using the gym for the yoga mats, there's plenty more equipment there to explore. We'd recommend it typically for small businesses that want to collaborate smarter, but to be honest, it isn't reserved for those, you can still use it as solo users.
Think of Spike as the all-in-one team communication tool, it wants to handle everything Slack, email and other tools do like Google Docs in one base. It will likely save your team money per month as one subscription, one experience - but sometimes with these tools you miss out on specialist qualities. Worth exploring for small-medium sized teams.
HEY! wants to change the way you think of email.
Focusing more on quality than quantity and too right. The developers 37Signals have been well known for their brilliance with project management software Basecamp, and this email app is no exception.
Hey Email have re-thought many systems like first-time senders being instantly blocked until you approve them, the "Imbox" that focuses on those core people who passed the check, and a feed for each of the types of emails you get like newsletter, file-based & more
Hey also gives you a @hey domain email which allows you a clean fresh start and worries are gone as they'll re-route that forever, even if you leave Hey. A lot of people like Hey for the focus on productivity and re-thinking handling your personal email inbox everyday.
Recently HEY! even added the ability to handle your calendar alongside email too, surprisingly and no shock, they called it HEY! calendar.
HEY! Email is a good investment of your time if you want to unstuck your email productivity because you're probably and likely don't have as much email management skills as you think once you start using HEY. The only issue is the upheaval in forwarding new emails in and almost in a way, starting email again. But trust me, if you want to re-think your inbox management and productivity, this is the tool to go with.
Hey Email is priced at $99 per year, so not crazy amounts, but still an investment - well worth it if email is your productivity bottleneck, you get overwhelmed and need a new system to learn implement and live by for better inbox management.
Canary wants to be your AI assistant and it does this by summarizing long emails for you, helping your write emails using AI, a chatbot that helps you manage your inbox and a unified inbox so that you can manage your Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and iCloud emails in one.
One of the good features you'll find in Canary Mail is a way to summarize emails that have landed in your inbox, this saves a lot of time scanning through and something more recently that apps like Superhuman have done.
In the last year, Canary Mail has been impressing many people as the new kid on the block with a focus on AI and better, smarter ways to handle email. For people that want something AI focused and to save them time, on top of their conventional email app that works well on iOS and Android, then this is a good option for you.
Newton Mail presents a clean way to handle email with features like send later, tidy inbox, read receipts and recap that better helps your email productivity with healthy practices to keep that inbox reduced and better managed.
Newton Mail comes with a good series of features and a reliable desktop application which we used for many years with no worries or issues. The features within are actually not too bad for managing day-to-day email and in the state of today's email apps, this is actually a mid-range email pricing, compared to HEY! Email & Superhuman.
One of the elements to note is that Newton has been acquired and sold two times, even shutting down, but current ownership seems more structured and longer lasting.
If you're restricted to Android and Windows, or the other way around with iOS and macOS, then Newton is widely available and works very well. For a lot of people this is an upgrade from Gmail and provides an all-rounder experience to managing the inbox.
Okay, now's time for help to be shared, let's narrow them down even further for you:
All round, everyday use, we have to say Spark Mail. A brilliant, well designed and feature-full application that is developed by Readdle, what more.
Skiff and ProtonMail both offer decent encryption that people want to see specially with email clients that send emails externally and use backends like Gmail.
Think Missive and Spike Mail battle this one out. Spike Mail better for all round team collaboration, but if it is just email, Missive wins this one.
In the hunt for more email apps and clients, explore our collection on Tool Finder.
There are a set of features that you need to be aware of when picking an email app.
Take these in mind when looking for your perfect email applications, we've shared a few tools to get elements of these right below. They will navigate which tool is actually best for you and narrow down that decision for your improvement.
A clean, distraction-free inbox, in under 5 minutes
SaneBox clears the clutter, so you can focus on your highest priorities and get more done.
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Resource Guru wants to be your team's base for time scheduling & co-ordination.
Salesforce CRM is a leading CRM software for managing relationships day-to-day.
Zoho Projects is an all in one project management system for teams.
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