Tag: Email »

Hop has created one of the most unique takes on email. Their iOS email client is a bit more like a messaging app than it is an email app. The update released today adds the two most requested new features, multiple account support and iPad support. Hop has also reduced response time in the app by beefing up their servers making the app even more speedy.

The multi-account support allows both individual inbox views and a unified inbox view. Customizations are available to make the email app fit they way users need to use it.

What makes Hop unique? As it turns out, tailoring the app to quick conversations, making it more message app like, speeds up usage. And that might be what mobile email should be. In speaking with co-founder Erez Pilosof, he noted that in their look into how people use Hop, they discovered that people act on many more emails, and do so quicker, using Hop over other email clients. The theory behind that is that the shorter messages lead to shorter, more casual responses, which lead to quicker conversations.

I also spoke to Mr. Pilosof about security. Since email security has become a bigger concern, especially so since Hop will have copies of users email on their server - a requirement for the service to work so quickly. He was quick to note that Hop takes security very seriously. Mr. Pilosof has past experience in security and they go above and beyond what other email clients do. Each message is individually encrypted with a unique key. Every single message. In addition, those keys are changed daily. This makes a mass breach of email almost impossible, at least on the Hop servers.

Often, incoming emails can feel like things to do - important items just kind of floating around the inbox until they're finished. Want to add these emails to the iOS Reminders app so that they can be dealt with in an important place? Well, this is possible by using IFTTT. Here's how to do just that.

First off, download IFTTT and register an account with the email address that you primarily want to forward items from. Now create a new recipe, which is what IFTTT calls the actions that it executes.

For starters, let's choose the Mail option. You can choose to forward all mail from your registered email address to the IFTTT trigger email address, or only emails tagged with a certain hashtag.

For the second part of the recipe, choose iOS Reminders. By default, this will add the email subject as a reminder to a list called IFTTT. However, that is an option that can be changed from the IFTTT recipes menu.

Tap on the recipe to open up its options, then tap Edit Recipe. From here you can configure what the reminder title will be, which list it will be added to by manually entering the name of the list, and what, if any, priority the reminder will have. Tap the blue plus sign next to an option to add in specific dynamic text like sender, body text, and more.

Now, if you use Gmail you should use the Gmail channel when setting up your recipe. This adds more options for what can trigger the IFTTT recipe. This can include emails from certain senders, emails with certain labels, starred emails, and more.

What the label trigger can do is make it easy to manage emails using Mailbox. Create a list in Mailbox with the title of your choice. Let's say it's Reminders. In IFTTT, have the label that the recipe is added to be [Mailbox]/Reminders. Now, whenever you add an email to that list in Mailbox, that will trigger IFTTT to add it to Reminders.

Now, you have a convenient spot to do things like send replies to emails once they are cleared from reminders. You can create a recipe in IFTTT to send emails when a reminder is completed in that list, but you might want to send more personal replies. Still, it is an option.

Hopefully this helps you get your inbox under a bit more control by utilizing IFTTT's powers of automation!

LinkedIn has launched a new service called Intro that connects with the iPhone email app, allowing users to see the LinkedIn profiles of those who sent the email. The Wall Street Journal reports that users don't need to leave the email app to see the sender's profile, which includes their name, picture, workplace, and title.

Make sure you check out the video below to learn more about LinkedIn Intro!

There have been a lot of apps lately that want to make email new again. Most of them just use the same old paradigms to view your email with folders and lists. But Ping seems email a bit differently. And it's trying make the process email more efficient.

The big idea behind Ping is that email should be a conversation, not a long novel of some kind. Ping takes email and makes it much more like a conversation by converting inboxes into more of an instant messaging client than a typical email client. Instead of lists of individual messages, all messages from a particular person are listed in a conversation. Those conversations can be replied to, just like an email. And if the other user is using normal email, it will look just like that to them. If the other person happens to be using Ping as well, then true instant mode starts and direct communication starts with the other person, no email needed.

Bulk messages and newsletters are handled the same way, but separated into their own view. So readers will only see one thread that lists all of the messages from any particular source like daily emails or special offers.

The end effect of turning email around from conversations on a topic to conversations with a person is efficiency. You can quickly respond to the messages with much less clutter than a traditional email box.

Ping represents a real change in email and how we use it. The first version is good and I can't wait to see what comes in future versions. Sign up for early access to ping at http://pingapp.com/ before it is released on September 18th.

Mailbox was already pretty great to begin with, but it's about to get even better. The (arguably) be-all and end-all Gmail app for iOS has just hit the ripe age of 1.5, and has received a fair number of improvements.

Chief among them is the ability for you to use Cloud Search to search through all your messages. Account-specific signatures have also been included, as well as the option to open links directly in Chrome. And, of course, the standard bug fixes and such that come with all updates.

If you haven't been using Mailbox, now is certainly not a bad time to start!

Evomail's handy inbox sorting and labeling just got even handier. In addition to some general stability fixes, the 1.2.3 update has added the ability for users to unify their inbox. What this means is that it's now possible to filter all of the emails from all of your accounts into one big catch-all box to make correspondence much easier.

The new Unified Inbox is bound to make current and prospective users very happy indeed. You can download the app for free and start organizing (and unifying!) your email accounts right now!