On Sale and Reviewed – ibisMail

Posted on 12 July 2009, at 1:30 pm, by Dan Cohen

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After reading the recent reviews in the App Store I almost didn’t purchase this app at all. I did purchase it, however, since I figured one of two things would happen… either I would get a good email app that overcame the limitations of the resident email app or I would have the opportunity to post about Apple allowing yet another lousy app through their faulty review process.

Well, I’m glad I spent the $3.99 on the app (it is currently 50% off ) since my experience has been nothing short of positive. ibisMail has already provided an excellent experience

Let’s take a look…

As you might expect, when you first start the app you are asked to set up one of your accounts. In my case that meant setting up my Gmail as an IMAP account…

Setup is typical and took only a few minutes. If you use Gmail and have a problem it is best to refer to Google’s setup information.

You then have the option to determine how many emails to load (25 – 1000!), the minimum font size to use (5 different sizes) and how many lines to preview (1-5).

You can select whether the screen always rotates or if it just rotates when composing an email so that the wide keyboard becomes available.

Once the initial setup is done the account loaded. It took a while to occur but that is only because I have a lot of emails sitting in the account. What is especially nice is that all my folders loaded and the app provides the opportunity to select and chance the folders, as well. In addition, when looking at both the folders AND the list of new emails icons to update incoming mail, mark an email as unread or begin a new email.

When individual emails load they do so with a great deal of information and flexibility. You can show or hide the “Sent To” field, easily read the body of the email and, with a tap, attachments load. The attachments implementation alone blows away both the native Mail app AND the on-line Gmail interface.

When reading an email a series of six useful icons sit at the bottom of the screen. You can move an email to a folder, delete it, reply to it, start a new one or use one of two filtering approaches.

Filter T	You can add a rule for message sorting “When you received messages from “From”, move it to “Trush”".
Filter	You can add rules for message sorting from header information as “From”, “To”, “Cc”, “Bcc”, “Subject”, etc

When replying to a message or starting a new one you can use macros to automatically input information.

Template macro table
%%	% itself
%f	From field
%t	To field
%d	Date field
%s	Subject filed
%n	Name part of From
%a	Address part of From
%m	Original message without quotation
%M	Original message with quotation
%A	Your address
%N	Your name
%S	Signature

For example, you can set it up that ever message reply you send includes the original message in quotes. You can also include a signature with or without additional information.

You can also set up templates so that this occurs automatically depending on the action you are taking.

Moreover, the all allows you to choose a different sound whether you are sending or receiving an email.

iPhoto

Here’s a quick video look from the developer (warning, horrible music attached to it)…

There are some significant downsides. First off there are a number of people reporting issues in the App Store comments on the app. Second, thanks to Apple the app does not fully integrate with the rest of the iPhone. Apps that make use of email still use the native mail app and emails only update when the app is launched. Those limitations aside, in my experience thus far this app is makes the experience of em

Get it for a discounted $3.99 right now in the App Store.