Apple includes its Mail app on every iPhone. While it’s a perfectly usable email client that connects to a variety of email services, including Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365, it’s not as feature-rich as it could be, especially for business and enterprise environments.
Fortunately, there are a wide variety of alternative email apps for iOS. In this article, I will discuss five excellent choices, each with its own unique feature set.
A note before we begin: I’m only including email apps that connect to multiple services. Services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail offer first-party apps that connect only to that service. They are generally solid options if you only need to access a single service.
Outlook
Outlook is Microsoft’s email and calendar app for iOS. It connects natively to Exchange and Microsoft 365 and enables deep integration with Outlook for Windows or macOS, making it an excellent and obvious choice in many businesses. But Outlook is not a one-trick pony. It also supports other email services, which means it can be useful if you want a single email client for work and home, or for situations where you need access to multiple work-related accounts.
Ryan Faas / IDGOutlook’s clean interface makes the app easy to navigate.
Outlook’s iOS interface is surprisingly clean and easy to navigate—in some ways, it’s better than its desktop sibling. Microsoft also offers an excellent Outlook watchOS app that continues the clean interface.
Like the Outlook desktop client, the iOS app reduces inbox clutter with an optional Focused Inbox feature, which places messages that Outlook deems more important in the inbox’s main Focused tab. Less important emails are put out of the way in the Other category. Other useful message management features include optional message threads and the ability to quickly flag, pin or snooze messages via swipe or a few taps.
While the email component of Outlook is pretty good, the calendar component could be better, and you might want to rely on a dedicated calendar app like Fantastical, or Readdle’s calendars, or Apple’s built-in calendar.
Spark
Spark is an excellent email app from Readdle that connects to all the major email services. It has a unique interface to help you sort your email by grouping new messages into three categories: people, alerts and newsletters. This allows you to focus on notification messages and messages from individuals immediately, then review emails sent to groups later. This sorting of messages doesn’t put them into separate folders (although Spark supports folders) – it simply separates how you view items in your inbox, and you can switch to a more standard inbox view at any time.
Ryan Faas / IDGSpark sorts incoming messages into People, Alerts and Newsletter sections.
Spark offers the ability to snooze messages to view them later, and it allows most actions like delete, archive, or pin to be done with specific swipes. It also offers workflow management options, with the ability to mark emails as ‘done’ or ‘set aside for later review’, and the pin feature lets you mark emails that need a reply or follow-up. You can also revoke a sent email – essentially you have a few seconds to click ‘undo’ after clicking ‘send’.
Spark’s watchOS app has a completely different interface to the iOS and macOS apps, but one that’s much more functional for the smaller screen — it still supports inbox sorting and most other features, and it works well with Apple Handoff.
Spark also offers a set of premium features for both individuals and organizations. For individuals, this includes options to set priorities for specific messages or senders, block and set “gatekeeper” rules, group emails by sender, and mute discussion threads that don’t require immediate attention. For organizations, there are options to share email drafts and regular email templates, shared storage, and the ability to assign messages or threads to specific team members. With an annual subscription, premium features start at $5 per month for individuals and $7 per user per month for organizations.
Edison Mail
Edison Mail supports all major email services. It offers a consumer-oriented feature set that’s also useful for business users, with the ability to manage travel plans, package tracking, bills and receipts, and refund status and more when it detects relevant information in your emails. It also offers the ability to view and cancel email subscriptions with a single tap.
Ryan Faas / IDGEdison Mail’s intelligent search technology can automatically filter emails related to travel, packages, billing and other topics.
There’s an optional premium feature set called Edison Mail+ ($15 per month or $100 per year) that makes it easier to update contact information, verify email senders, block spam calls and texts, and display caller ID information detected from email your records on incoming calls.
Edison Mail’s interface also supports setting swipe options for your inbox, snoozing messages, and engaging in a focus mode to avoid distractions (somewhat superseded by Apple’s Focus mode that debuted in iOS 15), and it includes a decent watchOS app.
Canary Mail
Designed primarily around secure messaging using PGP encryption, Canary Mail supports most common email services. Like Spark, it organizes messages in your inbox into several categories, including Personal, Social (emails from social media or notifications), Updates, Forum (emails with a forum or list server), and Promotions (emails that offer special offers or services). Canary also supports dark mode, custom swipe actions, and the ability to snooze notifications.
Ryan Faas / IDGCanary Mail is built around secure messaging.
Like Edison Mail, Canary Email offers a premium feature set called Canary Pro for a one-time fee of $20. The Pro version includes a wide range of features, including contact profiles with additional details for the sender of any email, a built-in calendar feature, easy access to messages from favorite contacts, pinned emails, compose suggestions when creating a new message, custom email thread actions, custom alerts, an attachment browser, end-to-end encryption, push notifications, read receipts, custom email templates, and custom snooze times.
The developer is also piloting an enterprise option that includes easy encryption key management, enterprise-wide PGP management, user onboarding, regulatory compliance support, and other enterprise features. Businesses can request to be part of the pilot by selecting an option in the app.
Spike email
Spike is an interesting response to email. It organizes all your email threads as chat conversations, similar to the messaging features of Slack or Microsoft Teams. This is an excellent tool for team collaboration where dedicated apps like Slack and Teams are not available. Email conversations can be sorted by people or subject. The app also offers shared or group tasks and to-dos, as well as access to calendars configured on the iPhone.
Ryan Faas / IDGWith Spike, you can sort email conversations by subject or people.
Spike lets you streamline your inbox by separating messages, though its sorting options are more limited than some other apps on this list, offering only Priority (people you’ve emailed before), Other (emails from “strangers”) and unread views.
Like other apps, Spike can snooze messages, supports swipe actions for message management (but in a more limited capacity than some other apps), offers quick message templates, and can be locked after a certain amount of time. (Although the setting only shows Touch ID as an unlock option, enabling it will enable unlocking with Face ID on devices that support Face ID.)
Spike’s free plan only supports one email address and limits search results to the last 60 days. To include more addresses and get unlimited search history, you need to upgrade to a paid plan. Pro and Business plans start at $5 per user per month (billed annually) and include more storage, group video calling, priority support, and other business-oriented features.
