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Old 30 Dec 2016, 11:17 PM   #8
jhollington
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 371
Quote:
Originally Posted by camner View Post
I definitely have NOT kept up with iOS Mail's improvements over the years. Once FM's app came out, I pretty much have ignored Mail. I should take a closer look!
Yeah, there have been some nice improvements, especially in more recent versions — I think a lot of it is driven by Apple's desire to be a real player in the business and enterprise space, where the built-in Mail client is much easier for most large organizations to deploy and maintain.

However, since the improvements are rarely earth-shattering compared to everything else that comes with a major iOS update, they're most often on the sidelines, so you don't see too many reports on them — they're just not as "sexy" as stickers in Messages, for example

That said, while I've dabbled in other clients off and on, I've generally preferred to stick with the built-in Mail app as of course it's the most tightly integrated, and also has provided the best reading experience of any Mail app since the beginning — especially where complex HTML messages are concerned. As a result, I try to stay up on the changes, and have covered them in my own series of iOS feature articles over the years — iOS 7 Mail probably saw the most significant set of improvements in recent years, but iOS 8 Mail brought enhanced swipe gestures which added a huge usability boost IMHO, along with smart contact and calendar event recognition, iOS 9 Mail added support for PDF markup and adding attachments from iCloud Drive and other third-party file storage providers like Dropbox, and iOS 10 Mail added account-wide conversation threading, quick mailbox filters, and smart filing of messages.

Factor in native push support with FastMail, and the bottom line is that the built-in Mail app has pretty much reached the point where I would no longer even consider using anything else. Not to disparage FastMail's own native iOS app, but I find the built-in Mail app to be faster, more tightly integrated with iOS, and you get full offline access to your messages (as long as they've been previously downloaded, but with native push, that's not a problem, and FastMail and iOS Mail even let you push folders other than the Inbox). The native client is more powerful for searching your mailboxes — especially if you're doing complex searches —*but iOS Mail is no slouch in this area either, especially considering the great work FastMail has done supporting IMAP search on the back end.

It's also worth noting that FastMail deserves huge kudos for implementing iOS Mail push properly — even Apple's own iCloud service is a very weak implementation compared to how FastMail has done this. For example, iCloud will push when you receive new messages, but it won't push out changes such as marking messages read or deleting them. This means you end up with a stale badge count on your iPhone or iPad if you're reading your messages on another device. FastMail pushes a complete reconciliation of everything that happens in your mailbox — leave your iOS Mail app open to your message list, mark a message read or flagged from your desktop, and you can actually watch it change within a second or two on your iPhone. It's really quite magical.

Quote:
I set things up the way I did for just this reason (Push) as well as being able to view FM messages more easily on iDevices by using the Mail app to connect to Gmail.
Yup, that was a common use-case scenario for a lot of people. I didn't want to forward in my case, so it's one of the things that had me go over to Gmail entirely for a while years ago, and then eventually give up on that and setup my own macOS Mail server (and figure out how to engineer "proper" push support into it ). Once FastMail began offering its own proper push support, the last major incentive I had to run my own mail server was gone, and I just moved everything back over here and haven't looked back since.

Quote:
for many years I was using Google Calendar, though recently switched to iCloud calendars
You may also find it worthwhile to take a look at FastMail's recent CalDAV and CardDAV improvements. You can now not only host your contacts and calendars at FastMail, but sync them to your native iOS Contacts and Calendars apps, also with complete push support. I haven't fully pulled the trigger on that myself — I'm still on iCloud for my Calendars, at least, since I share a few with non-FastMail users and it's just easier to keep everything there — but it's definitely worth a look if you wanted a tighter integration of everything in one service. It's especially valuable for your contacts, as you can then more effectively take advantage of server-side rules that filter based on contact.

Last edited by jhollington : 30 Dec 2016 at 11:26 PM.
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