Apple Mail Is Not Half Bad

Everyone rushing to sign-up for Apple Mail is not a thing that happens. In the aughts, people flocked to Gmail. A few years ago, Hey mail was the buzz. I see Proton Mail making some waves these days. And believe it or not, my wife still rocks a hotmail (HTML, get it?) account that she started in the 90s! But Apple Mail? Well, I know a guy who uses it: me. I’ve been using both the Apple Mail app(s) and iCloud mail service for years – until this month.

In late 2020 when I switched from an Android phone back to an iPhone, I went all-in with Apple (again). I prefer the most seamless experience, which means using Apple software and services on Apple hardware. The Mail app is native, built into the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. With that, I made an @icloud.com email address my one-and-only.

So is/was it any good?

Well first you should know that my email needs are very basic. About 5% of my email is personal correspondence. The other 95% consists of newsletters and notifications from various accounts and services. All my professional email is stuck on my work PC in Outlook – it’s a whole other animal.

As I figured, using Apple’s “it just works” email system, for me, is/was a seamless experience. Every account I've signed up for recognizes iCloud.com as a legit email address. I don’t think I’ve ever missed an email. When an account immediately emails me a code or a verification link, I get it in moments. It’s always been reliable overall.

Junk mail filtering is okay it seems. I still get more than I’d like, but the total number is something like one a day on average. Sometimes there’s a false positive – a good email that shouldn’t have been flagged as junk – but it’s relatively rare. Nearly zero junk messages ever make it to my inbox, so that’s good.

If I gave the iCloud mail service a 7 out of 10, then I’d give the Apple Mail app(s) a 9 out of 10.

I’ve been using (and still am to a degree) the Mail app on iPhone, iPad, and my M1 MacBook Air. They’re solid. Apple keeps things very simple and clean. But again, I’m not an email power-user. I mostly receive items and rarely send. The few times I do email someone, it’s mostly text. Sometimes I send an image attachment or a link.

My complaints are small and few. I don’t like dragging an item onto a message I’m composing on the Mac because it inserts it inline instead of attaching it separately. And the text – even the text formatting toolbar – is too small by default. Sometimes the whole thing feels barebones, but then again the minimalism is part of its strength; this makes it easier to use overall, especially on the phone. That said, I have one other kind of major gripe – I’ll get to that in a bit.

After relying on Apple Mail for the past four years, I started switching to Gmail this month.

Apple and iCloud Mail work – but not on my Android phone. I actually tried the iCloud web mail client via Chrome on my Android phone; it would hardly even load the page. So thanks to enjoying my Moto Razr as my main phone, I’ve been migrating back to Gmail for everything. It’s a great service and is popular. And I really like how well it ties into Google Calendar, Drive, Keep, Tasks, Maps, and Contacts – the whole Google platform. 

Even if I eventually get bored with my Android phone and revert to my iPhone as my daily driver, I plan to stick with the Gmail app and service there too. That’s for two reasons: 1) The switching cost is not fun and 2) Gmail is cross-platform; I can use it everywhere with a great user-experience overall.

The Gmail app on my iPhone works well enough and isn’t any worse than the Apple Mail app. In fact, there’s one feature about it that I love: when I archive or delete an open email, it automatically switches the UI back to the inbox. This is how I prefer it, moving back to my “base” where I can survey what email I want to open next, if any.

But Apple Mail on my iPhone instead moves straight into the next email – the one before or after, I don’t know. To me it’s jarring and forces me to mentally process the next email whether I’m ready or not. So then I must manually back out, which sounds trivial, but that niggling requirement adds up – it’s annoying. So that’s my only “major” gripe I think.

I’ll add that I’ve also used Gmail service tied into the Apple Mail app on my iPhone a few times. In my limited experience with that, I can say it seemed to work fine. But I don’t recall how many emails or how often they were pushed or fetched.

If you’re curious whether or not Apple and iCloud Mail can work for you, I hope I’ve helped with this info. Apple Mail works well and is nice enough that I could stick with it. But Gmail works better for me now since it’s on Android and is cross-platform.

Now that I think about it, if Apple Mail was available on Android (like Apple Music is), I’d probably stick with it just to avoid the switching cost. But oh well – I’m already far down the migration path and want a service I can use everywhere for all-time. That’s assuming Google doesn’t bury Gmail in the graveyard next to Google Reader etc.