Back in Ep 74 – April 19 – Working with emails I talked about an email application called MailMate. It is a small stand alone emailing application that I have been using for the last 2 and something months. Yesterday the trial ended – there must be something wrong with that counter since 18 of April to 28 of June is way more than 30 days. But I don’t complain.
Before I decide which app to use I wanted to try out some other ones as well. One of these are AirMail and that is what I will talk about today.
AirMail is a small Mac OS, iPad OS and iOS mail client. You can use it for free on iOS and iPad OS but to also use it on the desktop you need to subscribe. You get 3 days trial if you jump on a monthly plan. I did and my plan is now to run the application for two months as a trial.
As I have been talking about in the past, I have a lot of email accounts. I may not be getting so much email on them – but it is a pain to check them all. I usually do that with different browsers and different browser profile in Brave to keep the sessions (especially for Office 365) separated. I prefer to not be working with emails in the browser since I find my self to easily distracted.
I will be running the application on both MacOS and iOS – and the experience seems to be quite similar. Here are some things I find quite interesting with the applications:
- Multiple Accounts
As many stand alone applications it is possible to add multiple accounts. I have added Google and standard IMAP accounts so far. It is left to also add a couple of O365 accounts (if allowed) so that I can a full email overview.
There is a few things here that I really liked. It will store the email account settings and sync them over iCloud. That means that it is super fast to setup the accounts on both my laptop and in my iPhone – the only thing I need to do is to authenticated since the password (or token) is not stored on iCloud.
It is possible to give each account a color. When you look in the combined Inbox it is super easy to see what email belongs to what account. A small but nice feature.
- Smart Mailboxes
Just as with MailMate it is possible to setup smart mailboxes. And I use that to get an overview of what I have stored in my “Action Support” and “Waiting For Support” folders to quickly get an understanding of what I need to do or what I am waiting for. I talk a bit more in detail about this in Ep 74.
- Nice looking UI
This is maybe not the most important feature for an application but it never hurts. It is a beautiful application. On both systems. The normal user interface is quite bare with only a few buttons and functions available. But it is highly configurable. This makes it really powerful. The down side is that the configuration pane is huge. So much settings.
- Templates
Maybe not something I will use a lot on the Mac since I use Keyboard Maestro to do text expansion. But on iOS I probably will be using it more. Just as you would expect, you can create text templates that you insert into your emails. Save time and brain power to fix standard type of emails.
- Editing
You have a range of choices to edit your emails. Both a HTML/WYSIWYG editor that seems nice and simple to use. But, if you want to, you can also create your emails with Markdown. This was one of the feature I really liked with MailMate – but I also realised most of my emails are quite simple and plain text will do fine. For me this isn’t a killer feature anymore.
- Sharing
You can interact with a lot of applications from AirMail. The ones I will do to start off with is OmniFocus, DevonThink, Drafts and Bear. Probably in that order when it comes to how much as well. But there are many more application that it is possible to work with. The opportunities here are huge compared to MailMate. This works on both platforms.
This is still something I haven’t used too much yet so it will be great to understand how well it works in reality. One thing that is super interesting is to see if it manage to get “Deep-linking” between OmniFocus and AirMail – e.g. when linking a task to an email to find the references.
There is so many more features in here that I need to explore. I really hope it does work as well as it looks like and that it isn’t just surface.
The price for a month is just shy of $3/month or $10/year. And then you get a pro for all your devices. To use it on your MacOS desktop you must have pro. On your devices it work, but is limited, for free.
I will have an episode with a more in depth review sometime in august when I have gotten some mails through the system.