Saturday 2 August 2014

Molto Email app for iOS is the best email client for iOS

A reimagining of an email client

I recently listened to the Twit Mac podcast and to some extent I regretted it because of the fact that the main presenter on there is really annoying. On the other hand, there is the part at the of the show where they give tips on applications for your Mac or for your iPad or iPhone and there can be some good advice given in this part of the podcast. In fact, there are two shows from this network I listened to that do this, one is for Macs and the other is for the iPad and I was listening to the iPad specific podcast and the presenter told us about an application called Molto. Molto is an email client for your iPad and it is different from your usual email application for your computer. Usually you have a window that is broken down into three parts with the list of email folders including the inbox, spam, trash and whatever specific folders you have set up for your email on the left-hand side. Then you have a larger window which is broken into two parts on the right-hand side and this can be split either vertically or horizontally. If it is split horizontally then the top part will be a list of emails that have arrived in to your email address and then when you tap on one of these emails you see the actual email in the window that is below. Molto app for iOS is a little bit different.

Molto iOS email app

How Molto works

When you first open the application you just see the inbox and cards which represent the emails waiting to you to peruse. So you will see within those boxes in the top part, who the email is from along with the date and the time and then underneath that you will see a short preview of the email. So you get a bit of an idea of what the email is about within this box and then one of your choices is to open the email to see more. You can tap anywhere on the box and the email will open up in the email client and you can easily scroll through the whole of the email. If you scroll right down to the bottom you will see icons that let you reply or forward the email. At the top of the email you will see the basics of the header of the email which is just who it is from and who it was sent to as in specifically which email, in case you are using more than one email address. Over on the right-hand side you get an option to mark the email and you can mark it with a star or you can mark as unread. Marking it with a star is they same as making it a favourite, so that you can find it easier later. Marking it as unread means that if you go to your Mac and open up your email client there, then it will be shown as an email that hasn't been read yet. This could be handy if you want to make sure that you read the email on a different platform as maybe there could be a link in there that you need to look at using an application on your Mac. An instance of this would be if it included a link to the App Store. In the top right corner of the email you see another opportunity to send a reply or to forward the email.

Email with Molto ios app

Molto Controls

There are a couple more controls in the top menu bar of the application. In the top left corner there is an arrow which will take you back into the viewing area of all of your emails in that folder, usually the inbox. Then further over on the right hand side you have five more options. The first option is an icon which allows you to move that message into another folder, so for example I have a folder for emails about photography and I can tap on that first icon and then there are instructions about how to move that message into the correct folder. The instructions are incredibly easy and all you have to do is to select one of folders which has appeared as a list of the left-hand side. The first icon in the list is to send an email to the trash, so that is quite self-evident as to what will happen with that email. The next icon is to send an email to the archive folder and I use this quite often for emails that I want to keep, but I don't want to have cluttering up my inbox. I like to go for inbox zero and this is a system where my inbox is just a clearinghouse for all of my emails that have arrived. It all has to be sorted and put in the right places. The next item is a couple of arrows diagonally pointing apart and this just expands the email out to fill the whole screen. It is a toggle switch, so the the arrows point back inwards when you are viewing the email full-screen and you can go back to where you were. Over in the far right-hand corner you have the icon that you use if you want to create a message for sending. There a few options that you can set in the settings for the app along with connecting to your various email accounts. All easy to use stuff.

Sending email from Molto

Tapping on the icon which is nearly always available over in the right-hand corner lets you send an email. The screen opens up with the fields ready for you to choose who you want to send the email to and the keyboard ready to start typing. There is a little plus icon in the right-hand corner of this area and tapping on this will allow you to choose from your contacts There is also an opportunity to do a search or to send an email to a group that you have set up within your Contacts application. On the far right there is also a small disclosure arrow pointing downwards which if you touch, will give you the fields for sending a carbon copy or a blind carbon copy to other recipients. After that it is just a case of typing in your subject and then the email to finish the job of sending a text based email. Up in the top menu bar there is also a camera icon which you can use if you want to add a photo from your photo albums or you can choose to take a photograph using the camera to add pictures to your email. Tap on the Send button and hey Presto your email is sent.

Using the Edit button in the iPad email app Molto

When you are looking at your screen full of emails you might not want to have to go into each one separately to delete a number of them that you don't want to see at all. For this you have the edit button in the bottom right-hand corner and when you touch on this you get a new view on the menu bar at the top and you can either select all of them or just specific emails in the view. When you have one or more of these emails selected you can then choose to Move, Mark or Archive multiple emails. If you want to delete the emails then you choose move put them and in the trash folder is at the top of the list that appears in a panel on the left hand side. You get a nice little animation of the emails being moved over to the trash or to any other folder in your email system.

Molto iPad app

The best thing about the iPad email application Molto

When you are looking at an email, whether it is fullscreen or within the initial view on your iPad, one of the things that you might do is to click on a link. Instead of whisking you off to your web browser application such as Safari, the Molto application opens up the website itself. I like this behaviour as it saves me having to swap back to the email application to finish doing the triage on my email inbox that I had started. You know how it is, once you get into your browser of webpages you are quite likely click on something else and forget about what you had started with your email inbox. That's just the way of the Internet, a never-ending series of rabbit holes for you to dive into and to never be able to finish off one simple job. So with Molto, the web page opens up and you can use the arrow in the top left-hand corner to get back to, first of all the email that you jumped from and then back into the email inbox. You do get a button which will allow you to open up your webpage on Safari if for some reason or other that it is not showing up properly within the web browser in the email client Molto. Or you might want to go into Safari to do something with the page as you get more options for sharing and so on.

The NoStylus verdict on the application Molto

I have to say that I really like this application as it really takes advantage of the touch interface you get with your iPad. It might take a little bit of getting used to at first when you are new to it, but for me it changed my way of working with email fairly quickly. You get a nice little sound when emails arrive and generally the application is really easy to use. After a couple of hours of having the application on my iPad I decided to make it my default email client on my iPad and I deleted the Gmail email client that I had been using up until now. I am now wondering if there is an application that will do something similar for my Mac. I will have to have a bit of a look around inside the Mac App Store to see what I can find. The Molto application is lovely to use because it is well designed and specifically it is good for the touch interface. It is really responsive as an application and has given me no problems whatsoever and also, did I mention that it is free. I highly recommend that you give the iPad email application Molto a whirl on your iPad.

I just put it onto my iPhone and Android phone too and I will be checking those apps out to see if there any differences between them.

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