Anybody experience issues with the outlook app? Shows new emails i.e. The badge count, but nothing in my inbox that is new
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Alternative Mail Apps
- Thread starter AJsAWiz
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I have taken a look at Timyo in the past and at that point in time it lacked quite a few features but I see they recently updated it. What features does it nowadays offer as well?
Can you attach the actual files not a link to it? I will give it another try.
I tested out another e-mail app called 'Hop' which is already out there for years and also seems to offer quite some features. UI wise it's pretty nice and you can choose between both chat layout or classic Inbox layout.
I did notice it took quite a while after I connected by Gmail to actually show something in the Inbox. Also there are a few things they could add/improve as well:
1) support third party keyboards because I can't use my Swype keyboard with their app now and again while I can use it with others. It works sometimes.
2) be able to set your own swipe setup both short/long left/right and be able to e.g. have both a short/long swipe left set to the same thing. I couldn't find any in the settings.
3) support URL scheme to open up a new e-mail for e.g. Launcher widget use.
4) ability to show attachments above on e-mail message instead of below it like you can with e.g. Outlook and Email by Easylido.
5) support for tickets to save to Apple's Passport (pass.pkpass)
6) their website is a bit weird. It's also a chatbot and doesn't offer a FAQ or even a contact link.
To mention a few, see also my comparison from a while ago of which some still applies today:
- Quickly attach files from cloud storage on iPhone, so not this annoying way
- Snooze messages
- Save e-mail as PDF (e.g. Spark, Airmail)
- Show attachments above an e-mail message (like Outlook or Email by Easylido)
- Attach multiple cloud attachments in one go (Spark with Dropbox if files are in same folder)
- Read receipts
- Awesome/advanced search (think of Airmail or Spark)
- Build in calendar (like Spark or Hop)
- Build in task/to-do in Email app (like Airmail)
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Yeh pretty sure you can attach the actual files now on timyo, but to be honest, I'm just using the outlook app now. I found Timyo way to busy for me, but as I said, if you can work your way around the various options it's quite a nice mail app.
It's much of the same, but here's what I prefer about my favorite client, SPARK
- Snoozing emails for later
- Predictive suggestions for sorting email
- Smart signatures
- Smart Inbox
- Improved UI
- General aesthetics
I can agree with most, except snoozing - which I haven't yet understood.
I for one don't want to be disturbed twice by the same message.
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On my MacBook Pro, the Spark icon jumps nine (9) times in the Dock before the app is open and ready. I call that extremily slow - reported it as perhaps my first issue during beta testing. It hasn't yet improved :-/
Mine takes two.
But I was talking about the iOS version, the graphics are painfully slow.
For me, it's a matter of timing. Oftentimes, I have an important email come through that I don't have time to address. However, if I leave it be, it'll get buried, so it's nice that I can snooze it to a more convenient time.
It's additionally convenient that all of the snooze times are customizable.
Can they just fix Spark please, because if I wanted to fetch my mail, then okay. But I want it pushed, and when I open it, the email is there. Can't really understand why this is still an issue
It's being pushed yes, but still the issue of the email not appearing in my inbox when I open it, but having to wait for it to appear. Thus it feels like a manual way of getting the email.
Unless I'm doing something wrong here. Hoping somebody has experienced similar.
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I have seen that behaviour as well with Spark, Airmail and Email by Easylido which all has to do with security I think but I'm not sure. It downloads the actual e-mail at the moment you open up your inbox. Although it doesn't makes any sense if you already received the notification before that there is a new e-mail. I think it has to do with apps like Outlook that actually download and store your e-mail already on their own servers.
I've had to play around with a few alternative mail apps in the past few days (to get a tricky account working), and having come across BlueMail and TypeApp it made me wonder why those exist separately and seemingly get updated and maintained. They are almost the same with a few small UI differences here and there, and seemingly come from the same developer (even though they are listed under different developers in the App Store and have their own separate web sites and so forth). Not quite sure what to make of it all.
It's indeed odd that the developer name is different although almost everything else in the apps is copy/paste. There are definitely better options out there as well as you know.
It makes perfect sense if you know how push notifications work on iOS. Push notifications do not come from iOS apps themselves. They come from an external server set up by the app developer. Furthermore, if an app is not open, then push notifications are handled completely by iOS, and the app doesn't even know that a push notification was received.
So typical email apps work like this:
1) An external server set up by the app developer connects to your mail server, and when it sees that you have received an email, it sends a request to Apple's Push Notification Service servers telling them to send a push notification to your device.
2) Apple's Push Notification Service servers then send a push notification to your device.
3) iOS receives the push notification and checks whether the app that the notification is associated with is open.
If the app is open, the system forwards the notification to the app to handle it however it wants. Keep in mind, the push notification just contains the text to be displayed in the visible notification, not the entire email, so even if the app is open and the push notification is forwarded to it, the app still has to go download the email from your mail server.
If the app is not open, the system doesn't notify the app that a push notification was received at all, but just displays the notification in the iOS notification pull down.
4) Assuming the app wasn't open when the push notification was received, it won't know about it until the notification is actually tapped to open the app, at which point the app still needs to download the full email from your mail server, which is why you don't see the email already in the list when you open the app for the first time after receiving a push notification for an email.
There is one possible way for the app to retrieve the email before you open the app, and that's through the background app refresh feature, if the developer has implemented it, and if the system has woken the app up in the background to refresh itself in between when the push notification was received and when the app was opened. But there are no guarantees there either as iOS gets to decide when and how often it wakes apps up in the background to be refreshed.
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