Review: MailWise is a clutter-free email client

Email. We all have to deal with it and we all wish we didn’t. I spend all day in and out of my mobile and desktop email clients and know the importance of finding one that makes handling email easier and more pleasurable.

MailWise is described by its developers as providing you with “your inbox as it should be”. The free email app prides itself on its clean and clear interface, taking the clutter out of the email experience. It’s not the only email app out there trying to improve upon and simplify the email experience — Mailbox and Inbox by Google being the obvious candidates — but it does hold some advantages.

Setting up an account in MailWise is easy. The app supports Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, Live.com, Outlook, MSN, Gmail, GMX and IMAP accounts and you are able to manage more than one account within Mail Wise. Unfortunately, there’s no POP3 support but for most people using purely webmail services, this won’t be much of a hinderance.

Once you’ve added your accounts, you can set up your update intervals (the more frequent the bigger the impact on battery life), notifications, the name of your accounts and other settings. You’ll also be shown a brief but informative tutorial that talks you through MailWise’s interface and main features.

MailWise is all about simplifying email and focusing on the content you need. You can view your mail by individual account or in a unified view. Emails are automatically grouped into conversation threads, much more reminiscent of SMS and IM apps. Email conversations are much easier to follow in this format with none of the lengthy email back-and-forth with multiple quote levels to trawl through in order to find the part you are after. Instead, each participant’s replies are clear and chronological.

What’s best about MailWise is how it strips out unneccessary headers and minimizes signatures. Although seemingly minor, in a conversation of twenty-plus emails you can very easily get bored of scrolling past the same same signatures every time! If you need the information in a signature, it’s still there — you just tap to expand it.

Newsletters and social notifcation emails are auto-grouped too meaning they won’t clog up your inbox.

Navigating MailWise is just as simple. The UI is clear and consistent — although minimal, I find MailWise to be a very good looking app (not quite Material Design, but not far off). The app makes use of a couple of gestures that you’ll be comfortable with if you’ve tried any other third-party mail client. Swiping left will archive your message by default (although this can be changed) and swiping right will bring up other options for deleting, adding to a folder, marking read/unread or starring.

You can easily search for mail in MailWise. I found the search function to be fast and accurate. It’s also possible to view just unread or starred items or just look at emails with attachments, which comes in handy.

If security is your main concern — perhaps if you deal with a lot of confidential or corporate information in your emails — MailWise could also be ideal for you because it has no server side and data is only stored locally on your device.

In the settings you can customize MailWise and alter things like account signatures, notifications, quiet times, account color, quick responses and more — it’s really worth diving into the settings to see how you can fine-tune the experience for your own use case. There’s only support for push notificaitons for Exchange accounts with push for IMAP being added in the future. You can, however, set notificaiton intervals to 1 minute for IMAP accounts if you wish.

If you’re looking for a simple, easy to use and highly-polished email app, MailWise is definitely worth checking out. There are certainly areas where some minor improvements would be welcome, but the clean, concentrated and clutter-free reading environment and unified inbox should be enough to satisfy most heavy email users.

Take a look at MailWise on Google Play or head to mail-wise.com for more information

source: androidandme