The app has all the basic features of an email client, but unless you plan to switch your email provider to my.com, it’s hard to find a compelling reason to use mymail instead of email apps standard on either ios or android.
supported services
Adding an email account to mymail is exactly as you’d expect: tap on a provider, enter your credentials, and voila, your account is added to the app. As mentioned above, you can add an existing Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, AOL, or Hotmail account. Do you have an unregistered email provider? mymail allows you to enter your credentials and will attempt to set up the account for you. As a test, I entered my icloud email address and mymail set it up successfully in a few seconds.
Or, if you’d like, you can sign up for a free my.com email address. the my.com offer gives you unlimited storage and eliminates password-based login. instead, during the registration process, you link your phone number to your username. Logging into your account requires you to enter a username, phone number, and a short code texted to your number. without all three items, you cannot access your my.com account. it’s a novel, but effective approach, not unlike two-factor authentication.
view, manage email
email management is done through a series of gestures and touches. Swiping across an email preview reveals a hidden menu where you’ll find icons to read/unread, flag, archive, mark as spam, or delete. tapping the avatar next to a message enables multiple selection, where you can then perform the same action on multiple messages. interaction with both mailboxes and messages is intuitive and hassle-free. Searching for email on a server is something many third-party clients lack, however mymail does it exceptionally well, taking a few seconds to return results.
The biggest drawback to how mymail services your accounts is the lack of a unified inbox. In other words, you can’t see all of your unread messages across multiple accounts in one view. instead, you’re forced to go back and forth between accounts to see your various inboxes, taking up time and potentially annoying you endlessly (depending on how many accounts you manage).
Creating a my.com email account is useful if you want private email that only exists on your phone, but it has its drawbacks. most notably, you can’t view your emails on a computer, so if your phone dies from a dead battery, there’s no way to get those emails back until you recharge it. managing your my.com email on a phone may be acceptable to some, but I imagine it wouldn’t be ideal for those who receive large amounts of mail on a daily basis.
no really amazing features
The special feature that mymail offers is the option to customize message notifications based on sender, social network or other online services. the option makes sense for your own email offering, but not for other services. Tags and filters are standard features found in the likes of Yahoo! and gmail and takes care of custom notifications, which makes mymail functions a moot point.
Attachment handling, both sending and receiving, is by default based on locally stored files (in the case of ios, it only allows sending photos, not actual documents or additional files). here direct integration with dropbox or google drive would be beneficial. you can attach files from any service using the android app, but the integration is done through android, not the mymail app.
conclusion
In fact, managing multiple email accounts is a point of frustration for many. but I don’t see how mymail puts an end to the frustration and I think at the very least it should offer a unified inbox. Stock apps on Android and iOS offer similar feature sets to MyMail, which doesn’t give MyMail a real breakout feature. Granted, it offers a full my.com account with as much storage as you need, but the “mobile only” approach is prohibitive. Do you really want to limit yourself to composing messages and managing your inbox from your smartphone or tablet? I know not.
Still, mymail is a breath of fresh air with a clean interface and is worth a try if you’re bored with standard email applications on your platform of choice.