[Closed] iPad Email Client - does the perfect one exist?

Sadly there is - it's called Outlook.

Spark was faultless for me for 2-3 years. I only stopped using it on my iPad when I realised I only used my phone or MacBook to do email stuff.

@PrinceJohn - Outlook would be ideal except it does not have collapsible folder trees.

Yes in 2022, so far I have only found one client that does and that is the inbuilt one but even that has other limitations that are frankly unforgiveable given the computing power of iPads these days

You could try Canary, but it's not free.

I use Spark, though my email needs are pretty basic. What do you mean by, you can’t get it to work “at all”?

@zilog6128 - got it working now but no collapsible folder trees and you cannot drag emails from your inbox into another folder either. Really is pathetic that there is not a decent app but hey-ho...

Will look at Canary as well. Not bothered about paying if it actually works for what I need.

I guess they don't because putting in mails in folders is not how they want you to use the tools. Basically leave all the mails in the inbox and use search to find what you want.

Personal emails for me are 2 gmail and outlook accounts and I use the respective apps, never have I filed anything. Both accounts have been around since 2000.

These days I don't even file work emails apart from at New Year where I create a folder for everything recieved in the previous year.

Appreciate this works for me and may not for you 🙂

@db - I can’t think of anything more hateful than having everything in just on folder!! Plus I don’t think that rationale particularly makes sense as the desktop versions of most email apps allow you to do all of this so it’s more a case they’ve hobbled the tablet versions either for historic reasons of computing power or to ensure you always have to buy a desktop or laptop as well as the tablet.

Webmail?

Aside from work email in Outlook I don't think I've used a full-fat email client since the days of Windows Vista.

I guess they don’t because putting in mails in folders is not how they want you to use the tools. Basically leave all the mails in the inbox and use search to find what you want.

That would be ok if any Microsoft and Google could actually fix their search so it was usable.

Don't know the exact Subject: line of your email, your shit out of luck ever finding it through either of thems search!

@Cougar - to be honest I had not thought of that. Hmmm - not sure whether my work email has a webmail option though however it is an excellent idea.

That would be ok if any Microsoft and Google could actually fix their search so it was usable.

Don’t know the exact Subject: line of your email, your shit out of luck ever finding it through either of thems search!

For me it is more fundamentally that I need particular emails in particular folders. I work in insurance and have a current year's policy underwriting in a folder. I could search however a quick search would bring up multiple years results, could miss some emails that didn't have the insured's name in the subject etc.

I could set up some fancy advanced searches but why bother when I can just have everything in nice neat folders so I can find stuff pretty much instantly. And, more importantly so can my MD and anyone else who may need to find various correspondence relating to a case 🙂

Ah well, as things stand the default Mail client is winning with Outlook and Canary close runners. Wish they would just port the full desktop versions across though to iPadOS. I am now running an iPad Pro 2021 so has the M1 chip and 8GB so probably more powerful than my workstation 😀

@Cougar - it would seem work have disabled the Outlook web client 🙁

What's the back end, Exchange / 365?

365 however when I log into 365 online, whilst I get my OneDrive and online versions of Word etc, when I click on Outlook it gives me an indecipherable error message so I am guessing it is disabled.

From memory we asked for it to be inaccessible for security reasons.

Tbh it sounds like you’re trying to use email to fulfil a function it’s not really intended for, and have been over-indulged in the past by bloatware mail clients with unnecessary features 😀 Maybe something like Trello instead which is meant to be like a virtual “filing cabinet”?

Or what about Gmail labels rather than folders?

Not really - being able to simply file emails in discrete folders is hardly bloatware, rather a fundamental feature of the software 🙂

It only seems to be the mobile device versions of all email clients that do not properly allow this. The desktop and webmail versions do it just fine.

You don’t want folders. You want a good search engine. Outlook for iOS is so so. I have it for the work client and save the mail for my personal and count. And n the MacBook I use outlook for both. It’s not as good as W10 though.

I use Spark and I'm happy with it. I use it on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

I have many folders and easily send emails from my inbox to whichever folder I choose. Is there something else you need to do, because it works well for me?

@TiRed - no I want folders for the reasons detailed above. I want to be able to quickly and easily find all emails relating to client X for the 2021-2022 policy period and having all those emails in a client x 2022 folder is the quickest and easiest way of achieving this with certainty.

I could use advanced search but this would be slower and less reliable than just clicking on the client x 2022 folder and hey presto - there they all are.

Having an inbox with 10,000’s of emails would be unmanageable with or without a decent search.

@easily - yes, Spark does not have collapsible folder trees. I have around 150 folders so having to scroll down to find the one I want is cumbersome, particularly as I am in and out of a lot of them all day so I would spend much of my day just scrolling.

My annoyance is that all desktop versions and nearly or web clients have this, it’s hardly cutting edge, yet the mobile apps seem to be hobbled in a way that makes them borderline unusable for me.

Ok dannybgoode, got you now.

It's a shame as I find Spark so reliable for my uses. Especially like 'snooze'. I snooze pretty much all my emails indefinitely 🙂

we asked for it to be inaccessible for security reasons.

What reasons were they?

It works only if the auto filter is reliably sorting emails into the folders. If manual, you’ll miss some or fail to go to the folders to read them. A search engine is far more powerful. You can set standard ones to pull messages.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/05/20/194578/stop-organizing-your-e-mail-says-study/amp/

In the two or so years of lockdown I’ve not missed a single email. I read an email in my inbox and then drag to relevant folder. I reply or send a new email, go to sent box and drag to relevant folder. Nothing gets missed this way. It can’t get missed because if I do happen to not see it, it’ll still be in my inbox for me to action 🙂

I am not really interested in what some study says - I know with certainty, that if I need to recreate a full file I can do. I know with certainty if my boss, the compliance manager, the regulator - whoever - needs to find an email I can tell them exactly where it is.

That report also does specifically mention finding single emails - see below - and threading. Useless for what I need to do.

If I were asking for some esoteric feature fair enough but this is core functionality for the desktop email clients so why can’t they just add the same long standing and basic features to the tablet version.

I would add that I find search incredible useful to find individual emails to but find a file’s worth where the subject line may not be the same as 5 or 6 people have been involved and spelling and formatting differences could mean that a search misses some. Plus a search often pulls up prior year emails as well and that doesn’t help.

What reasons were they?

I am assuming they don’t want a web login as that is very slightly easier to attack than setting up and then trying to attack an account through say, Outlook. Whether this has merit or not I have no idea.

To be honest it’s an annoyance more than anything, I would just like to be able to work from my iPad as I do my workstation and just can’t fathom why collapsible folders is just not a thing on the mobile version…

Sounds like you need a laptop not an iPad…

@jam-bo. I have a laptop :). My point still remains, why hobble the iPad version of say outlook in this way?

I guess my question has been answered though. No, a decent email client for iPadOS does not yet exist 🙂

An iPad email client that fits your very niche requirement doesn’t exist. That’s different.

I’ve got a couple of folders (anything I’m cc’d into gets automatically moved out of my inbox)  on my exchange email account, I can access them and move emails to/from with the iOS mail app.

do you have to create them in iOS.

@jam-bo - folder creation is meh. A collapsible folder tree though - I hardly see that as niche :). Now, Mail does have collapsible folders but the UI is otherwise just not as slick as Outlook. Flagging emails and working with attachments is horrid.

Does it really matter. In the scheme of things not really, I’m just surprised how badly tablet email clients seem to lag behind their desktop versions. Back when processing power on tablets was limited there was perhaps a good reason but these days?..

The IPhone mail app collapses a folder structure with an exchange account. I don’t have nested folders but I don’t care enough to try it…

What version are you on? 15.4 has collapsible folder nesting and the ability to add new folders in the Apple mail app. Or have misunderstood your requirements?

@drlex - Yes Mail now has collapsible folders but the rest of it is hideously clunk, particularly attachments and flags. As I say it isn’t life changing one way or the other, I was just interested if I was missing something and it seems not.

Just a bit surprised that, given how slick so many things Apple does are, no one has yet built a proper mail client for it yet. Outlook comes the closest but hey, I can still do my job and plenty of computing options…

I am assuming they don’t want a web login as that is very slightly easier to attack than setting up and then trying to attack an account through say, Outlook. Whether this has merit or not I have no idea.

It was likely a great idea two decades ago. Honestly, I'd query this with work, it might well solve your issue and there's little reason not to provide OWA these days so long as they've implemented MFA.

Just a bit surprised that, given how slick so many things Apple does are, no one has yet built a proper mail client for it yet. Outlook comes the closest

Which is why I asked what it's connecting to. You likely don't really want an email client, you want an Exchange client and for most practical purposes that's going to be Outlook. The iOS incarnation probably isn't 'hobbled' but rather the primary focus of development for MS is going to be their own platforms.

@Cougar - all entirely fair and I appreciate an iPad is not quite the right tool for the job either. Apple’s Mail and Outlook are both 95% there in different ways so perhaps both will finally get the final few features and I may speak to our IT folk and see if OWA is a possibility.

Still loving my iPad Pro though - beast of a tablet. Was very tempted by the Samsung Tab 8+ and DeX in particular looks useful however Android just isn’t quite there for tablet use despite Samsung’s best efforts to smooth over the gaps.

I think Spark would prefer you to use tags and use the ‘Smart Mailbox’ for everything. This has the advantage that things can be in two categories at the same time.

It’s a bit like in 2004 when a lot of people got very upset that iTunes/iPods refused to recognise folder structure, instead forcing you to use their search. But I don’t know anyone still using WinAmp and their nested folders of mp3 (or wma) files.

I think you’re just trying to use the client in a way that they’re not envisaging/encouraging. Appreciate that’s how you work - and change is probably hard.

I was keen to read this as I literally think the apple calendars are absolutely rubbish!

Open the calendar and when you have something in there you just see a dot!
Suppose the notifications area is how it’s utilised properly with “upcoming appointments”

@Superficial- as I say, the desktop versions so everything I need, just not the ipad versions so it's no biggy. Looking around, no android client works properly either so it seems to be a mobile device thing.

Folders are a prerequisite for what I do as each one is the underwriting file for that client so for compliance reasons it really helps to have each one properly segregated as 'a thing'. I don't want anything to have two categories, I just want all the emails relating to client x's 2022 policy in a folder for that clientand that policy year. The emails also need to be in strict chronological order hence why threading is useless as well in my case.

Bear in mind also that each client file needs to be quickly and easily found by my colleagues in the office using full outlook and if I set up some bespoke system just to suit me it'll bugger that up too.

And yes, I still very much use nested folders for my music files but don't use iTunes and never will because it's shit 🙂

I guess they don’t because putting in mails in folders is not how they want you to use the tools. Basically leave all the mails in the inbox and use search to find what you want.

That would be ok if any Microsoft and Google could actually fix their search so it was usable.

Don’t know the exact Subject: line of your email, your shit out of luck ever finding it through either of thems search!

I'm a 'one folder' person but I've used Mac most of the time for over a decade and at some point the search in Mac Mail got significantly worse. I don't understand what changed or maybe despite using it every day I don't know how to use it properly but I find Mac Mail search hugely unreliable (whereas Outlook a decade ago was really good, and if I really have trouble finding something now I can usually find it if I log into my mail account via Gmail web interface and search there)

How do you get to an 'advanced' search interface in Mac/iOS mail? So that I can drill down into a search for say 'Sky' to narrow the results (because I I can't work out why it's given me a load of the stuff that shows up when I put in, say @sky.com to get everything sent to me by the company)

Use the full fat version of Outlook on a Surface Go?

I guess they don’t because putting in mails in folders is not how they want you to use the tools.

Thing is about this statement - the desktop version allows it, the OWA version allows it, it is just the tablet version that doesn’t, so MS are asking me to use the same tool in different ways on different devices if this were the case.

I don’t think it is though. I just think for one reason or another the tablet version is hobbled a bit compared to the others.

@richwales - I don’t want a Surface Go. I can work just fine on various devices. I was just interested if a proper email client exists for the iPad so I can use that as and when also. It doesn’t so I’ll file this under FWP 😀

I’ve just checked my iOS email client and it has collapsible folder structure.

It also has the option to add mailboxes… which are basically folders. Ok on mine it then proceed to raise an error but the functionality is present and worth checking.

Yes the inbuilt app is very close to being usable but it is very clunky and got some reason I can't add folders on some of the areas I need to.

Attachments and flagging etc are basically horrid to do. Outlook also comes very close.

If they could combine the features of them both it'd be perfect 🙂

I think it is now indicative of where he ipad is now. It could easily run full day ios these days and the ipad pro is nearly as expensive as an Macbook Air but Apple want you to buy both.

Things like multitasking are horribly hobbled when there is no particular reason for them to be so any more.

The whole thing is one decent OS upgrade away from being perfect. In the meantime I can easily make do overall