Email. What thought just went through your head? Did a sick feeling enter into the pit of your stomach because the unread count has become too overbearing? While the usefulness and proper technique to handle email are debatable, the fact is that email is still a necessary evil. It is definitely worth investigating to find the best way email works for you. If you have been struggling to keep tabs on your inbox then using email similar to a task system might be beneficial.
Attempting to help fix email is no easy task, but Mail Pilot wants to change how you think of email. Instead of seeing an inbox and folders, Mail Pilot sees email as either incomplete or complete. By utilizing review times and lists, Mail Pilot wants to remove the stress from email and help you process your email quicker. If dominating email sounds attractive, then keep reading on to see if Mail Pilot is the answer to a new email workflow.
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Complete Your Email
Mail Pilot wants the focus to be on completing emails and knows an unread count showing zero does not mean everything is complete. This point is driven home from the founders of Mail Pilot, Alex and Josh, when talking about their favorite aspect of Mail Pilot:
… is the replacement of the read/unread icon with a complete/incomplete control button. Reading a message shouldn’t change its status. Users should have full control to change the status of messages only when they’re done with them.
With that being said let us focus on how to complete email in Mail Pilot. All emails in your inbox will load into the incomplete tab. A sliding sidebar lays underneath the incomplete tab to navigate to other areas of the app. Using the message list or the top menu bar above a message a user can mark an email complete by hitting the check mark. This moves the email into the complete folder.
At first launch instructions are presented to make sure you are in the right mindset to sail through your email.
While it is great to complete email and check these items off your list, some items may be completely for reference and do not fall under the incomplete or complete category. Not only does Mail Pilot utilize your folders for organization it also supports lists. Creating lists can be done via the menu bar above a message or in the action menu in the message list by clicking the bulleted list button. The advantage of using a list over a folder is lists work across all of your email accounts which allows you to put all of your emails in one place related to a specific theme or event.
Scheduling Email
Sometimes email is not actionable the very moment it is received, so Mail Pilot allows you to schedule a time for the message for later review. By swiping to the right you can set the message to be set aside, reviewed tomorrow, reviewed in five days or reviewed in seven days. All of these are applied by using a gesture swipe to the right but vary depend on the length of the swipe. For example, to review an email tomorrow, swipe half of the length of the email message.
The speed of the swipe to review a message does not affect which review time is selected, just the length of the swipe.
Once a message has been set to be reviewed it will disappear from your view until the appropriate time has passed. When the date of review has arrived the message will appear in the top of your incomplete section. At the top Mail Pilot will also show how many messages are overdue for review, which can help you focus on getting caught up on items that might be important.
Sailing through my inbox!
Sometimes your review needs might not fit into the specified frameworks of tomorrow or in five days, but you know you will need to review this email at some point. Mail Pilot utilizes a set aside list for these emails to clear them out of the inbox and available for review when time is available. If you are familiar with the Getting Things Done (GTD) system, this is very similar to the Someday/Maybe list where you accumulate items that you would like to do someday but the current importance is small.
Using the calendar scroll wheel, messages will reappear on the exact desired date.
To cover all scenarios, there also might be times when you know the exact date you would like an email to appear back into your view. Pressing the calendar icon in the menu bar or action bar allows the user to choose a specific date to see the message again. By utilizing these three different methods it can be very easy to clear out an overrun inbox in a small amount of time.
Design and Functionality
You’ve probably noticed the app’s overall design. I was very happy to see that most of it does not rely on standard iOS UI selections. The most appreciative UI decision, in my opinion, is the notification banner. It’s unobtrusive and clearly indicates when a message has been sent or that there are no more messages to pull down from the server. Also, the best part of the notification banner is that it disappears on its own without needing interaction from the user. Other developers, including Apple, take note.
Of course, the app can not just look pretty but has to be stable and really stand out in comparison to the Mail.app since it already ships with iOS. With version 1.0, I did find stability a question by having the app crash on several occurrences. There was a certain trigger which seemed to set them off, including setting a specific review date using the calendar. It is unfortunate it occurred, because I really like the overall functionality, especially in comparison to Mail.app.
Email feels more conversational thanks to the conversation box and forwarding messages is a breeze with the fwd button right next to the reply box.
Mail Pilot makes it easy to organize and process email messages but that is just one facet of an email client. Replies to messages are typed into a conversation box much like in an instant message client.
If you decide to not send a reply and delete the typed content out of the conversation box, the keyboard will auto hide once all content is deleted from the conversation box.
When sending a message, a spinning wheel shows the progress and a notification banner will appear when the message is sent. Unfortunately, the spinning wheel would keep spinning after the message has been sent, which at first was confusing because I couldn’t figure out if my message was sent or not. After realizing I could trust the notification banner that proclaimed the message had been sent, I had to click out of the spinning wheel each time after sending a message. It became more of a nuisance with each email sent.
That Other Email Client
If you follow iOS app news, you probably heard about a similar app called Mailbox which was released earlier this year. Both of these apps want to help you clean your inbox quicker and they do have similar characteristics, but they are different in a couple of ways.
First, you will notice that Mail Pilot is not free, which I like. I prefer to pay for services and apps which I rely on. The application cost is the only way for Mail Pilot to make money since there are no recurring subscription costs. Mail Pilot has been around since June 2012 after it was successfully funded in February 2012 on Kickstarter. The idea in February 2012 was the same, but the design was completely different. The team at Mail Pilot built a web app to get off the ground and then spent the last few months building the native iOS apps. Consider the purchase of Mail Pilot as in investment since email is most likely one of the top uses for your iOS device.
The second main difference between Mail Pilot and Mailbox is where these emails are stored. Mailbox runs your emails through their servers and then to your device. Mail Pilot does not utilize a server but rather communicates directly with your email server. This offers the best protection and privacy, which means if you trust your email provider, you can trust Mail Pilot to view and manage it.
There are no push notifications for new messages in Mail Pilot. For some this might be a blessing, others, not so much.
Finally, the last difference between Mailbox and Mail Pilot is that Mail Pilot includes support for all IMAP email clients. Some of popular options directly supported include Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo and AOL. The good news is that even if you run your own email server, if it supports IMAP, then you can use Mail Pilot. Mailbox will be supporting other email providers in the future, but not having support for these providers out of the gate has been a sour note for many users.
Conclusion
Mail Pilot is an impressive version 1.0 and provides evidence to back up the claim from the developers that:
we have developed the most stress-free, context-friendly, automated, and sensible email experience to ever hit a mobile device.
By completing emails and scheduling your emails for review until you can complete them, you can reach an empty inbox in no time. While version 1.0 is not without a few bugs, including some occasional crashing and lists not automatically refreshing, I find Mail Pilot and its future development a worthy contender for email on iOS.