The best alternative email apps for iOS 15 make it simple and easy to manage your email outside of using Apple Mail.
It’d be fair to say that much of the world runs on email, making it a must to have the best iOS email app for you. And while communication tools like Slack, WhatsApp and Discord all exist for instant messaging, email remains the way many people communicate, particularly in business. Whether it’s sending projects for approval, connecting with a loved one, or simply sharing notes for the latest office meeting, there’s plenty of life in email yet.
While your iPhone comes with Apple Mail installed, it’s not for everyone. Apple continues to improve it, but it can be a little clunky to use and lacks many of the more nuanced features of other email apps. For basic sending and receiving messages, it’s great, but if you deal with a lot of emails, you may be looking for something flashier.
Thankfully, there are plenty of alternative email clients out there you can use on your iPhone or iPad, all of which make smart changes to the basic formula. To put together our list, we've compared the best features offered with each, including smart inboxes, usability, calendar and meeting compatibility, and cost.
Here then is our list of the best alternative email apps for iOS 15.
We've also listed the best business Macs.
The best alternative email apps for iOS of 2023 in full:
It may seem a little strange to be trumpeting Microsoft's Outlook as one of the best email apps for the Apple iPhone, but it really is an excellent choice.
Microsoft’s long-running email client looks better here than it ever has before, it's also slick to use and plenty powerful too. Its Smart Inbox works out which emails are important for you and snoozes the others for later. You can also swipe emails to perform quick actions (something that many other apps on this list do).
Perhaps our favorite aspect though is that the calendar within Outlook is so good you can use it as your main planner. Its inclusion means that all your meetings and events, whether they’re from Google Calendar, iCloud, or elsewhere, are all in one place.
Read our review of Microsoft Outlook
Hey has been the subject of much discussion, both in terms of its pricing, feature set, and the fact that the developer and Apple had a falling out over in-app payments.
Nonetheless, Hey is an excellent email client from the makers of Basecamp, the widely-used project management software. Its avant-garde approach to email won't be for everyone (nor will its hefty $99 annual fee), but users desperate for a new approach to email will be thrilled.
For they'll find that they get all kinds of great features, like the ability to screen emails from new senders, and unique filtering rules like the Paper Trail (for receipts) or The Feed (for newsletters).
To use Hey, you’ll have to direct all your existing email to it, but doing so will let you pick a custom @hey.com address.
Of all of the apps on this list, Spark feels the fastest to use, and it’s got a great visual style with plenty of color in icons but mostly plain everywhere else.
Available on the App Store for free, there are plenty of features here that should give Apple something to ponder for an updated version of Mail.
As with others on this list, there’s a Smart inbox, but we’re particularly fond of Spark's array of 'actions' – you can snooze a thread, remind yourself to follow up later, create Smart Notifications, and more. There’s also a nice slide-over calendar, too.
Spark also plays nicely with attachments, letting you download and open files within the app itself rather than dipping into another option. Attachment search is great, too, and you can attach whatever you’re sending to cloud services straight from the app.
Edison is another good-looking Apple Mail alternative, but its real superpower is its built-in assistant.
Edison’s assistant will filter your emails by type or sender, and it’s perfect for those with butterfingers since it’ll let you undo the sending of an email up to fifteen seconds after you hit the Send button. There’s a clean, uncluttered interface that makes good use of the slide-to-action options seen elsewhere on this list, too.
There's also support for dark mode; and a unified Inbox that enables you to combine your inboxes from most providers (but not currently Exchange). It’s also ad-free and automatically blocks email trackers to help protect your privacy.
Edison leans a little on Hey’s business model, now that it works with OnMail. You can use Edison for free, but paying $4.99 will get you a custom domain, password-protected large file links, and an increased attachment size up to 250MB.
Read our review of Edison Mail for Mac
The new kid on the mail-block, Twobird is part email app and part to-do list – and it’s great at both.
The email experience removes as much from around the actual content of your email as it can, cleaning up the experience to let you focus on the who and the what.
Like others on this list of best alternative email apps for iOS there's a unified inbox, but what stands Twobird apart is you’ll also be able to turn the emails in your inbox into a task list of sorts, tying it in with your other daily reminders, while smart notifications work out what you need to know and when.
Twobird is off to a great start, but there’s a big caveat – there’s no option to currently add your iCloud here, sadly. Gmail and Exchange users, however, will find a lot to love.
Airmail has a smart-looking design that feels ripped straight from Apple’s own design language. In fact, it feels like Apple Mail, but better. Not that this should come as a surprise, as it has been designed specifically for iOS, macOS and watchOS.
The real strength of Airmail is in its integrations with other services – be those web services like Gmail, Outlook, and Exchange, or other apps on your phone. If there's an app you use, chances are, Airmail can too; Google Drive, Todoist, Drafts, Trello, they’re all here. It’s a far cry from Apple’s more siloed experience.
While Airmail is free, you can upgrade to a Pro plan for $2.99 per month (or $9.99 per year). Doing so gets you a unified inbox, multiple themes, and the option to snooze and delay sending. There's also a really useful rules function that can handle email automatically when it arrives, depending on your preferences.
Spike shakes things up by attempting to blur the lines between email and instant messaging. It looks closer to iMessage than it does to Apple Mail, which may put some people off.
In truth, it’s closer to something like Slack, stripping away the need for long emails full of headers and signatures and boiling it down to the message content and any attachments. It’s configurable for teams, too, so you can send an email to a group of colleagues as if it were a Slack message.
There are built-in notes and task management options, too, with both working collaboratively. And just like others on this list, there’s a Priority Inbox so you never miss an important email.
As a relative newcomer to the scene, some growing pains have been reported with some features of the app, but there's no doubt that as these are ironed out Spike will become a major player in the space.
We've also listed the best iOS productivity apps.
How to choose the best alternative email apps for iOS for you
If you’re an Apple user and you’re on the hunt for the best alternative email apps, then there’s a good chance you’re not entirely satisfied with Apple’s default Mail client. So the first thing to consider is why you’re not entirely convinced by Mail?
Do you find it too clunky? Is it not quick enough? Or is it lacking certain features that would make your emailing experience a much more intuitive process?
Once you’ve decided what factor you require improvement on or what features you’re on the hunt for, you can begin to whittle down the list of best alternative email apps for iOS. As the above explains, Outlook is a great shout if you’re looking for a platform that offers seamless synchronisation with your default planner or calendar. Alternatively, some of the newer kids on the block offer smart inboxes that offer a level of automation on how your emails are filed and filtered.
Even something as seemingly minor as Edison’s delayed send could prove a vital feature if you find yourself commonly emailing the wrong recipients. Either way, once you’ve prioritised your key requirements, align it with your budget, as not all options on this list come free.
The best alternative email apps for iOS: How we test
To come up with our list of best alternative email apps for iOS, we've considered a range of options that provides a real variety of approaches to email. No longer are users restricted to the basics of sending and receiving mail, with newer applications taking a fresh new approach to electronic mail.
This includes 'smart' inboxes, which can be tailored by the user to file emails based on set rules. In the above list, we've considered where and how this may be of use, or where infact it may provide a step too far for some people in terms of required functionality. We've therefore also compared more traditional yet immensely useful functionality – like synchronising with calendar and meeting applications, delayed sending, and email chain snoozing.
Of course the key to an easy life these days is connectivity, and so any mail app worth its salt should be compatible with a host of other apps and services – we've listed above where this is the case.
Read more on how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar.
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