The best email app – CloudMagic vs myMail

There are numerous options when it comes to email on your Android phone. Google Mail is the obvious choice, but your phone may come with another general email app and there are dozens in the app store. Which is best?

Many apps claim to be the perfect email solution, but are they really any better than the apps that come with the phone? I tried CloudMagic Email and myMail – Free Email Application. Both are free, both are highly rated on the Play Store and both handle multiple email accounts.

CloudMagic Email

This email app is very popular and has a lot of fans. Adding all the main email providers is easy and it is preconfigured for Gmail, Outlook, Exchange, Yahoo Mail, iCloud and there is general IMAP too. It takes just a few seconds to add your account and in under a minute you can be reading and sending email.

The home screen shows all inboxes and this is the app’s best feature. You can view all emails from Gmail, Outlook and others on one screen. A small irritation though, it only shows five email headers at a time. Many apps show six.

I find the home screen a bit dull and unexciting. The colours are grey and it is just plain text. Swipe in from the left and your email accounts are listed. Tapping one opens its inbox and there is an option in the settings to set the colour. This makes it slightly more interesting.

A common feature in email apps these days is sliding left or right to reveal buttons or perform actions. There are three in CloudMagic, delete, archive and read/unread. Where is the delete button? That’s another minor irritation and the button is there when you open an email full screen to read it.

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CloudMagic Cards enable you to perform actions without leaving your email. Evernote is one example and you this offers Quick Save and Edit and Save. There are cards for Todoist, Asana, OneNote, Trello, Salesforce, Zendesk, Mailchimp and more. These can be very useful if you regularly use these apps along with emails.

I like the way that each email account has its own settings, so you could turn on notifications for one, but turn them off for another. I have a work account that I need notifications for and another non-important one that gets a lot of junk and I don’t need notfications.

It handles labels in Gmail and folders in other email accounts like Outlook very well. You can view a label or folder and see all the messages assigned to it. This is another essential feature for me.

myMail

All your email accounts can be added to myMail and this makes it useful if you have more than one. It is preconfigured for Google, Yahoo!, Outlook, Exchange and AOL, and there is Other Mail for everything else.

myMail looks brighter, more colourful and more attractive. It looks a bit like Gmail and next to each email is either the contact’s picture or a large and colourful letter. Email can be dull, but myMail does its best to make it look good. It also fits six email headers onto the home screen too, and this means that you can see more of your inbox than CloudMagic.

Swipe left over an email in your inbox and as is usual these days, there are buttons perform actions. There are more than with CloudMagic and there is read/unread, flag, move (to another folder), mark as spam and delete. I like the range of these buttons and it means that messages are easier to deal with in myMail. The full screen message view is clean and simple too.

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Swipe right and your email accounts are displayed at the far left. Select one and all the folders or labels are listed. You can easily switch accounts and view any label or folder.

There are many good features in myMail, but there are some limitations that are annoying. For example, there is no all-inboxes view. To check all your email you must select an email account and view the inbox, select the next account and view the inbox, and so on. CloudMagic is better in this respect.

Another problem I had with myMail is that there is a single setting for notifications. One of my accounts is important and another isn’t, but notifications are either on or off and when they are on I get notified about every email whether it is important or not.

One final irritation is that I have set up Google Alerts. Whenever a news story breaks, Google sends it in an email to me. I have set up a rule to skip the inbox and apply a label. This way news stories are separated from the regular email. myMail keeps notifying me about Google Alerts and I don’t want this. CloudMagic does not and this is how it should be.

The best email

Neither of these email apps are perfect and they are close, but have limitations or irritations. I prefer the look and action buttons of myMail, but CloudMagic would be the easiest to live with because of its all-inboxes view, separate settings for each account, and CloudMagic cards. Some sort of blend of the two would be perfect.