Email App Review: Apple Mail iOS and ipadOS

When sorting through emails on your devices, it’s good to know whether or not your email app will work well to support your use and productivity.

No one likes it when it takes two weeks to get a response to an email! While it’s easy to dismiss a notification and forget about it, your email app should support you and remind you to respond.

If your email is purely for personal use, you may just want something simple without a million unnecessary functions.

If you have a flood of clients and colleagues to respond to instead, you may want something a bit more optimized that supports your work.

If you’re wondering if Apple Mail iOS and ipadOS would work for you, and how you can get the most out of Apple Mail— here are our thoughts on the app!

What is Apple Mail iOS and ipadOS?

Apple Mail iOS and ipadOS are email apps on each of these Apple operating systems.

Currently on their 16th major release, these operating systems are for your Apple iPhones and iPads, respectively.

Apple Mail for iOS and ipadOS comes pre-downloaded onto your devices and is a basic but robust email system for reading and responding to your emails.

Apple Mail iOS and ipadOS Features

Image of someone tapping screen of iphone. Blue graphic envelopes indicating emails are floating from the phone.

In terms of features, there aren’t many differences between Apple Mail for iOS and for ipadOS.

The key difference is that ipadOS takes advantage of the iPad’s laptop-like functions, making the layout slightly different.

1. Checking for Mistakes

Before you send your very important email, Apple Mail will check for any mistakes you may have made.

The app will not only check for typos, but will also ensure that you haven’t forgotten any attachments or missed any recipients.

Never send an email without forgetting to attach an important document again!

2. Schedule Send

Image demonstrating how to schedule an email to send later in Apple mail for iOS.

If you have an email to send at a specific time—whether it’s for a certain day, or if you don’t want to be replying to emails when you’re off work— Apple Mail allows you to schedule your email ahead of time.

Just choose a date and time to send it, and your recipient will get your reply exactly when you want them to.

3. Remind Me

Image demonstrating how to schedule an email to set a reminder to respond to an email at a later time.

If you have an email you want to respond to later, or an email that will be relevant at a specific time (such as appointment reminders), Apple Mail has a Remind Me feature that will resurface that email at a scheduled time.

This email will stay at the top of your inbox, which means that you won’t have to scroll through the rest of your inbox to find it.

4. Follow Up

This feature is designed to bring your sent emails that have not received a response in a few days to the top of your inbox so that you can follow up with recipients.

This is an automated feature, and the app decides which emails are relevant based on whether it assumes that an email needs a reply.

5. Smart Search

If you’ve struggled to look for a specific email because a word was spelt wrong, or can’t remember the exact words used, Apple Mail’s smart search function is perfect for you.

Apple Mail’s search will search for your email, even if the spelling in the search bar is a little different from the email in question.

It will also look for synonyms, so you don’t need to unnecessarily try different word combinations or scroll through hundreds of messages!

6. Unsending Emails

Image demonstrating how to unsend an emaiol in apple mail for iOS.

Apple Mail gives you a default 10 seconds to “unsend” an email.

These 10 seconds are a delay before the email actually sends, and the delay time can be changed in your settings to up to 30 seconds— giving you a bit more leeway.

Apple Mail iOS and ipadOS Reviews: What Do People Think of It?

Image of group of people sitting around a conference table looking at an ipad screen.

Surprisingly, Apple Mail hasn’t had many changes over the years, which means that other third party apps have surpassed Apple Mail in terms of productivity features.

Apple Mail does the job of receiving and replying to emails fine, especially if you’re just looking for an app to read and type a quick reply to.

Functionally, there aren’t many major issues with Apple Mail.

The biggest issue that people do have with Apple Mail, however, is its lack of productivity features when compared to other email apps.

Productivity features such as Remind Me and Follow Up are not exclusive to Apple Mail, and have been used by other email apps such as Outlook and Spark long before Apple caught on and added them.

Users generally agree that third party email apps tend to have better and more efficient equivalents to these features.

For example, a feature that has been anticipated by users (but unfortunately is not included in the latest Apple Mail update) is a ‘snooze’ feature.

While Remind Me attempts to do this job by reminding the user to respond to emails at a later time, it functions differently than snooze features from other apps.

Instead of doing what most third party apps do by removing the email from view until a scheduled time, it keeps the email in the inbox and simply reminds you it’s there.

This difference in function can make it confusing if you’re shifting from a different app. Additionally, because of the difference, it doesn’t always do a good job of actually reminding the user of that email!

It’s also important to note that Remind Me leaves emails marked unread, so if you’ve already opened and set it aside for later, you could miss it.

Another productivity feature that can be a bit of pain is the Follow Up feature.

Because Follow Up is determined by the app itself and not by the user, the machine learning isn’t always correct, and will sometimes label the wrong email conversation under Follow Up.

The user has no control in manually adding emails either, which can make the function a bit useless.
Apple Mail iOS and ipadOS is also lagging behind other third party email apps when it comes to its ability to organize and sort emails.

Apple Mail iOS and ipadOS Pricing

💰 As a stock Apple app for iOS and ipadOS respectively, Apple Mail iOS and iPadOS come free and already downloaded onto your device, making it easy to set up and run.

Apple Mail iOS and ipadOS Pros and Cons

Pros

👍 Pre-downloaded on your Apple Device – This makes Apple Mail just one app less to download.

👍 It’s simple – Not everyone needs a ‘snooze’ feature, or productivity tools to optimize every minute of their day. If you just want an app to make sure you can read and access all your emails, Apple Mail does the job.

👍 Remind Me will stop you from missing emails – One plus side of this function is that if you often get a lot of emails, and need to ensure you don’t lose an email under a flood of other emails, placing the email in question at the top of your inbox will ensure that you won’t miss it.

👍 Multiple email account integration – Apple Mail can handle multiple email accounts from different email services.

Cons

👎 Apple Mail isn’t optimized for productivity – If you’re looking for something with a better range of features, there are many other apps you can consider.

👎 Apple Mail also doesn’t have many options for sorting through emails – You can sort them into folders, but it lacks the sorting system that Gmail has that sorts your inbox into primary, promotions, and social.

👎 Productivity features aren’t always intuitive – In addition, there are better functioning equivalent features on other third party apps.

👎 Follow Up is automatically decided by the app – This can make it convenient, but if the automated feature assumes incorrectly, it can be annoying to see your sent email at the top of your inbox when that conversation needs no follow up.

The Bottom Line: Should You Use Apple Mail iOS and ipadOS?

Apple Mail is easy to use as a basic email app.

If you want a no frills app to read and respond to your emails, it will do the job just fine.

However, if you’re looking for something that will support your productivity— whether for work or personal use— we recommend considering one of the many other free third party apps available.

Apps such as Outlook, Gmail, and Spark offer many more productivity features than Apple Mail iOS and ipadOS. Either that, or they simply do it better!