Hands on with Airmail 1.5

Fariha Khan
January 17, 2017
1,026

You can connect a series of Airmail functions in order to improve your work productivity and weed out important emails from the less-so. If you're a casual Apple Mail on iOS user, you may wonder why anyone would bother look for a substitute. In case you are a serious user of email on Apple's mobile platform, you may hope it will improve things for you.

There's a fair chance that you haven't observed the omissions in Apple Mail. It happens when you rely on email and are forever having to make a move according to what you get in your email. Particularly, that they will make it better and simpler to automate some things you need to do always.

As Apple offers Mail and has its own Reminders app, it's confusing that the company doesn't already allow you do this. Since Apple introduced the great share sheets allowing you to pass documents from one app to another, it's sad that Mail doesn't support the feature. This is where Airmail can help.

With Airmail, you simply swipe on the message in the inbox or tap on a button while reading the message. In any case, you get to see a list of actions and you can send that email off to OmniFocus, or any other popular To Do apps you want instantly.

Swap to Airmail and you have this one- or two-tap process for getting emails out of your way and out of your inbox. For example, you are hoping for an email from a new client. It might be better to make them an email VIP so that you get the message even when you turn on Do Not Disturb. It is not possible in Apple Mail. In fact, you need to get out of that and go to Contacts or Phone to make it possible. On the other hand, with Airmail you get the ability to swipe on a message, tap on Action List and Add Sender to VIP. That’s is all.

Airmail has been doing it for a long time, and this new version has not really changed that. But what it has actually done is to combine together a series of Airmail features. For example, you get an email from an important client. As you set up everything, a single swipe or tap will chuck that message into your To Do app as a new task, it will record your boss's email and send an automated reply to it as well. In addition, it will mark that customer as a VIP too.

It does make powering via your emails much faster than possible otherwise. If things call for additional merit a longer reply from your side, you can do it better using your Mac. There is an Airmail for Mac, helping you stick to the same software on both.

There is additional thing in this new update that may convince people to shift from Apple Mail. Now Airmail 1.5 supports Workflow. If you make use of that app to automate stuff on your iPhone and iPad, you can plug Airmail into it now.

For instance, if you are to make a client list you can have a Workflow that remove the name of the sender and puts that at the last of an Evernote document.

Apple Mail appears simple and it certainly has fewer features compared to its competitors. However, it does a great job. In addition, it just looks good and as the majority of your email time on an iPhone is spent reading the stuff that is important.

Airmail can substitute Gmail, Apple Mail, Exchange completely. But it is possible that it will not be a full-time replacement. You may continue to use Apple Mail until such time as you have got many messages and little time to manage them. So you can make use of Airmail to save time and energy.

Airmail 1.5 needs iOS 9.0 or higher and is priced at $4.99 (App Store). You can also benefit from the Mac version of Airmail 3.2.1 that needs OS X 10.8 or higher and is priced at $9.99 (Mac App Store).