MailPilot, MailBox, or not?

English: USA mailbox
English: USA mailbox (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I treat my mail clients like I treat my web browsers – I like to switch them out as needed, or as mood dictates. My data is all stored off in gmail, so really I’m just working my way through different facades. So long as the underlying mail isn’t harmed, I’m willing to experiment with a few different apps.

For part of December and into the leading days of January, I was running a program on my iPad and phones call Mailbox. When it was released, I switched over to using MailPilot on my desktop, so between the two I gave them both a whirl for about 3 weeks or so. Both mail clients are somewhat gmail specific, but for my purposes that’s fine.

The Good

There is a certain approach to mail that both clients overlap on, and its one that I appreciate. For good or bad, my inbox – especially my work inbox – is something like a todo list. I’m still managing to keep close to Inbox Zero, but there are times where you want to defer something – a few hours, a day, even a week. In this regard, both clients excel – both offer the ability to hide mail for a specific amount of time.

Mailbox does this better, in the sense that it lets you specify more granularly how long you want a message to go before it pops back up in your inbox. MailPilot would one less star for this, since they instead just present you with a calendar from which you are expected to pick a date. Not a show stopper, but the granularity of Mailbox (this afternoon? tomorrow morning? a specific date?) is nice.

All things being equal, and with the understanding that MailPilot really does try to treat your mail like a todo list, complete with marking messages as “done”, the two products are really comparable and awesome.

But.

The Bad

First, there’s cost vs platforms. MailPilot is available on both the desktop and as a mobile app – but only at a cost. I got the desktop app at half cost, so it was a reasonable $9. Full price, I’m not sure is as reasonable. The kicker is that it costs that much for the mobile app ($9).

Mailbox is free – but only exists on the mobile side. While what it does to your mail to move it around (applying gmail labels and removing it from the inbox) isn’t unrecoverable or unusable in other clients, it isn’t subtle about being managed by Mailbox.

The Worse

Mail clients, especially mail clients designed to help you work through mail more effectively with all of these bells and whistles, shouldn’t be so fragile if you get a lot of mail. I found that Mailbox would frequently crash when dealing with too much mail, had no easy mechanism for dealing with a batch of mail in bulk, and did *too* good a job of hiding my labels in gmail. Plus, the mobile only annoys me – I work with mail on the go, but I also work with it on my desktop. I can’t afford to have to do all of my mail through an iPad or phone. That path leads to chaos!

Mailpilot, likewise, seems to only display 72 messages at a time, has issues with bulk deletes/moves, and although somewhat stable, has still crashed on me multiple times. Plus, Mailpilot fails to provide what I would consider common features. For example, in order to write a message, you have to have the client up and displayed on your screen – having it as the active app is not enough.  Many of the commonly used keystrokes you expect in a mail client are missing, and, frankly, aside from being able to post-pone messages, its just plain clunky.

Which Leaves Me…

I’m pretty much where I started, minus that $9. Both products have great potential, and are perfect for folks that only deal with a small amount of incoming mail. But if you use labels so you can review bulk messages (say, from your server farms) later, or just receive a lot of mail in a day, you may find yourself having to open up the web interface to gmail daily so  you can better manage your non-inbox mail. Or search your mail. And as soon as you start doing that, haven’t you defeated the purpose of having a mail client?

Enhanced by Zemanta