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If you‘re drowning in email and want a better way to manage your overflowing inbox, Airmail may be just the app you need. Airmail is a feature-packed email client for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch that aims to help you process your email more efficiently.
With a modern design, extensive customization options, and wide-ranging integrations, Airmail offers a compelling alternative to Apple‘s built-in Mail app. I‘ve been using Airmail as my primary email client on Mac and iOS for several years now. Here‘s why I think it‘s one of the best email apps available today.
What is Airmail?
Airmail is a full-featured email client that works with all major email providers, including Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, Yahoo, and IMAP accounts. Originally launched on Mac in 2013, Airmail has since expanded to iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
The app offers a modern, customizable interface for managing your inboxes. But beyond the sleek exterior, Airmail packs in a robust set of power-user features designed to help you take control of your email.
Some of Airmail‘s key features include:
- Unified inbox to manage all your accounts in one place
- Customizable swipe actions, keyboard shortcuts, and quick replies
- VIP contacts and smart notifications
- Snooze messages to handle later
- Send emails later to delay delivery until a set time
- To-do, memo, and done labels to manage emails like tasks
- HTML editor and templates for composing rich emails
- Integrate with apps like Todoist, Asana, Trello, Omnifocus, and more
- Create rules and actions to automate common workflows
Overall, Airmail aims to be an all-in-one productivity hub for all your email needs. But does it succeed? Let‘s take a closer look.
Pricing
Airmail for Mac costs $26.99 as a one-time purchase from the Mac App Store. You can try it free for 30 days before buying.
Airmail for iOS follows a subscription model. It costs $2.99/month or $9.99/year after a 3-day free trial. The iOS app unlock across iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.
While not the cheapest option compared to free apps like Apple Mail or Spark, Airmail offers good value for the extensive feature set you get. Let‘s explore those features in more detail.
Design and User Experience
Airmail features a clean, modern design that looks great on Mac and iOS. The UI is highly customizable, letting you personalize everything from the layout and color scheme to the swipe actions and keyboard shortcuts.
On Mac, Airmail supports a traditional 3-pane view with accounts and folders on the left, your message list in the middle, and the preview pane on the right. You can easily collapse panes you don‘t need to focus on what‘s important. There‘s also an attractive dark mode for low-light environments.
The iOS version automatically adapts to different screen sizes. On iPhone, you get a focused single-pane view for quickly triaging emails on the go. iPad users can take advantage of the larger screen with a spacious multi-pane layout.
Airmail‘s thoughtful design extends to usability as well. The app supports familiar gestures like swiping to archive/delete messages. You can also customize the swipe actions and sidebar options to fit your needs.
Overall, Airmail hits a sweet spot – balancing attractive design, intuitive navigation, and deep personalization. While there‘s a bit of a learning curve to master all the features, Airmail does a good job progressively revealing its power as you get comfortable with the app.
Snooze and Send Later
Two of Airmail‘s most useful features help you manage when to deal with emails you receive and send:
Snooze
If an email requires action but you can‘t get to it immediately, just snooze it for later. Airmail temporarily hides the message from your inbox and brings it back at the designated time. You can choose from preset snooze times like Later Today, Tomorrow, or This Weekend, or pick a custom date. It‘s a handy way to clear out emails you can‘t address now without forgetting to circle back later.
Send Later
On the flip side, Airmail‘s Send Later option lets you compose an email now but schedule it to deliver in the future. Just write your message as normal, then click the Send Later button to choose when Airmail sends it out.
This comes in handy for several scenarios:
- Delay a late-night work email to send during business hours
- Queue up messages to arrive on a specific date, like a birthday or anniversary
- Set reminders to yourself to send on a future date
Both Snooze and Send Later help you manage your email more intentionally, rather than being held captive by the constant influx of messages. They‘re subtle but powerful tools for preventing email overload.
Turning Emails into Tasks
Another way Airmail helps you stay on top of your email action items is with the To Do, Memo, and Done labels. Think of them as a lightweight task management system built right into your inbox:
- Mark an email as To Do to indicate it requires action, similar to flagging
- Tag reference material you need to save for later with Memo
- After completing an email task, mark it as Done
Airmail gives these labels special treatment, collecting them together in dedicated smart folders in the sidebar. This makes it easy to see all your email-based tasks in one place and track your progress.
While not a full-fledged task manager, these simple organizational tools help bridge the gap between email and your to-do list. For more advanced needs, Airmail integrates with popular project management apps like Asana, Todoist, Things, and Omnifocus.
Integration with Third-Party Apps and Services
In addition to task managers, Airmail offers extensive integrations with other productivity apps and services. This allows you to extend the functionality of Airmail and sync your communications across your workflow.
Some integration highlights include:
- Cloud storage: Attach files from and save attachments to iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box and more.
- Calendar: Send calendar invites via Google Calendar, Outlook, or iCloud right from Airmail.
- Notes: Forward emails to note-taking apps like Evernote, OneNote, and Apple Notes.
- Team collaboration: Delegate an email to a colleague on Slack, or pipe it into team communications on Basecamp and Asana.
- Social media: Reply to an email later as a comment in Airmail, or as a tweet on Twitter.
- Read-it-later and bookmarks: Save links from emails for later reading on Instapaper and Pocket.
To use integrations, you authenticate your accounts under Airmail‘s Preferences. The apps then show up as options in the Action menu when viewing emails.
Airmail‘s integrations work smoothly for the most part, but they have some limitations. Unlike more deeply integrated combos like Outlook-Office or Spark-Readdle, most of Airmail‘s tie-ins are one-way. So while you can send content from Airmail to another app, you can‘t always interact back the other direction.
There are exceptions, though, like being able to import a contact from BusyContacts or attach notes from Evernote to a new email. If your needs revolve mostly around getting data out of your inbox and into your other tools, Airmail‘s integrations should suffice.
For the tech-savvy, Airmail offers URL schemes and an open API to build custom integrations. While not for everyone, these allow you to connect Airmail to almost any other app or web service with a bit of coding.
Automation
For advanced users, Airmail offers a range of automation tools to streamline repetitive email workflows:
Rules
Similar to filters in Gmail or rules in Outlook, Airmail‘s rules let you automatically process inbound and outbound messages that meet certain criteria. Rules follow simple "if this, then that" logic, but you can build complex workflows by combining multiple conditions and actions sequentially.
Here are a few examples of what you can do with rules in Airmail:
- Automatically sort newsletters, notifications, and other categories of emails into designated folders
- Forward emails from specific senders directly to a colleague or Slack channel
- Trigger an alert for urgent emails from your boss
- Highlight emails with attachments for quick reference
- Automatically archive old promotional emails after 30 days
Take time to think about your most common email patterns and see if you can automate them with rules. Investing the effort upfront will save you time and mental energy processing those types of emails in the future.
Actions
In addition to rules that fire automatically, Airmail provides a customizable Actions menu to quickly apply a series of steps to selected emails. Actions are similar to Quick Steps in Outlook – they combine multiple discrete steps into a single command.
Some useful Actions to set up:
- Compose a template reply, apply a label, and archive an email in one click.
- Forward an email to your task manager or calendar and mark it as Done.
- Delegate an email to a teammate via a linked app like Slack or Asana.
Actions combine well with other tools like VIPs, smart folders, and keyboard shortcuts to optimize your email processing flow.
Plugins
Lastly, Airmail supports a plugin architecture to extend the app‘s functionality with new options for viewing, editing, and acting on emails.
Some of the most popular plugins include:
- Previewing emails in Markdown format
- Decoding Base64 encoded emails
- Applying advanced spam filtering
- Encrypting messages with PGP
There‘s an active community of third-party developers building plugins for Airmail. You can find a curated list on the Airmail website or browse open-source options on GitHub.
Airmail Alternatives
As much as I enjoy Airmail, it‘s not the only good email app around. Here are a few alternatives to consider:
Apple Mail
The built-in Mail app in macOS and iOS is a solid choice for basic email needs. It‘s not as powerful as Airmail, but it‘s free and integrates tightly with Apple‘s ecosystem. If you mostly use stock Apple apps, Mail is worth a look.
Microsoft Outlook
Outlook is the gold standard for business email, especially in Microsoft-centric organizations. Its deep Office integration makes it a workhorse for calendar, contacts, tasks, and file management. But Outlook‘s UI feels clunky and dated compared to Airmail.
Spark
Spark is another popular third-party email client for Apple devices. Its standout features include an intelligent Priority Inbox that automatically categorizes emails, and collaborative drafts for composing emails as a team. Spark is also free for individual use, with paid plans for teams.
Superhuman
Superhuman is an up-and-coming premium email app with an invite-only onboarding process. It‘s geared towards power users who are willing to pay for a personalized concierge setup and support. At $30/month, it‘s significantly pricier than Airmail, but you get a bespoke email experience in return.
There are many other great email apps for Mac and iOS like MailMate, Newton, and Hey. It‘s worth exploring your options to find the one that best fits your needs.
Privacy and Security
No Airmail review would be complete without touching on security and privacy. Trusting your email to a third-party service always carries some risks compared to first-party apps from Apple, Google, or Microsoft.
Fundamentally, Airmail requires full access to your email accounts in order to work its magic. That means the app can read, send, and delete emails on your behalf. This is concerning from a privacy standpoint, since a bad actor could potentially access sensitive information in your inbox.
Additionally, many of Airmail‘s best features, like snooze and send later, require the app to store copies of your emails on its cloud servers. That‘s another potential attack vector for hackers.
Fortunately, the Airmail team seems to take security seriously. According to their privacy policy, all data is encrypted in transit and at rest using industry-standard TLS and AES-256. Airmail‘s servers are located in secure data centers with strict access controls.
Airmail also responded quickly to patch a critical vulnerability discovered in 2019 that could have allowed an attacker to steal files from a user‘s computer. There haven‘t been any major incidents since then.
Of course, you can never eliminate risk entirely when sharing login credentials with a third party. But I‘m reasonably confident that Airmail is taking appropriate measures to safeguard user data. Ultimately, you‘ll have to decide if the security trade-offs are worth the productivity benefits for your situation.
Conclusion
With its attractive design, flexible customization options, and extensive integrations, Airmail is a powerful tool for taming your inbox. While not the simplest email app around, it strikes a nice balance between capability and ease of use.
That said, Airmail isn‘t for everyone. If you only use email lightly, you may find its advanced features overkill. And if you work in a locked-down enterprise environment, you may not have the option to use a third-party email client at all.
But if you want a productivity-first email experience, Airmail is hard to beat. Its thoughtful feature set – from snooze and send later to email-to-task management – is designed to help you process your email more efficiently and get on with your day. And its broad ecosystem of integrations and plugins lets you mold the app around your ideal workflow.
For Apple-centric power users willing to invest a little time up front to set things up just right, Airmail will reward you with an uncluttered inbox and a calmer relationship with your email. That‘s why, despite some minor drawbacks, Airmail remains my top pick for the best Mac and iOS email app.