The Usual Preparations
While I believe that there is no such thing as the perfect email client, PolyMail might be one of the few that goes in the right direction. The app is free and available for both the Mac desktop and the iOS mobile platform. The first thing that you need to do is to set up a PolyMail account using your email address. The purpose is to enable special features and to sync all of your PolyMail clients across devices. Please note that this registration process is separate from adding your email accounts. If you already have an account, log in using your credentials.
The next step is to add your email account(s). Polymail currently supports GMail, iCloud, Microsoft mail service (Office 365 and Outlook), and other IMAP accounts. To add a new account go to the “Preferences -> Accounts” menu, and click the “Add Account” button.
Polymail will sync with your email providers and display everything in a unified inbox with folders for each account. It means that you can manage all of your emails from one place.
Hitting the Sweet Spot
Other than the usual features that you can expect from any email client, Polymail comes with several tricks up in its sleeve that will help you take your email management to the next level.
1. Email Tracking
Have you ever wondered whether your emails had served their purpose? Do you often wait for the reply without knowing if the recipients have read the emails? While Polymail can’t tell you when you will get an answer, at least it can tell you when your emails are read using the “email tracking” feature.
You will get live notifications the moment your emails are read, and there’s also a small indication next to the email telling you when, how many times, and who who read your email. The feature is turned on by default, but you have the option to turn it off when you compose your emails. The feature will only work with the emails that you send using Polymail.
2. Follow Up Reminders
Related to email tracking, Polymail also has a “Follow Up Reminders” feature. It tracks your sent emails and tells you if no one reads them within a time limit that you set. For example, if you send an email to your team about assignments that they have to finish before the meeting next week and no one reads the email after three days, you can call them to follow up.
And thanks to email tracking, nobody in your team can lie about not receiving the email if they actually have read it.
3. Undo Sending
How many times have you been in the situation where you wish you didn’t hit the send button? Maybe you forgot the attachment that was supposed to go with the email, you still needed to edit the text, or you just realized that you sent it to the wrong address. Whatever the reason, Polymail gives you the ability to “Undo Sending” your email to avoid those silly and unnecessary mistakes.
The only catch is the feature will only work within a few second after you hit Send. If the email has already hit the server and been delivered, there’s nothing that you can do to cancel it.
4. Other Features
Even though not as fun as the previous three, other great features come with Polymail. For example, you will see the “Unsubscribe” button on email newsletters or other commercial emails that support unsubscribing.
You can schedule your emails to be sent at a later time so they will arrive at the best time for the recipients and not get lost under tons of other more recent emails that they receive.
You can also snooze some of your non-urgent emails that you receive to clear your inbox and help you sort the ones that have higher priority. The snoozed email will appear later when you have time.
Rooms for Improvement
Polymail has just graduated from the beta stage and is still a hatchling of version 1.0.1. Bugs are to be expected. Here is a couple that I found. First, adding an iCloud account is currently disabled, and there’s no visible way to add other IMAP accounts. Secondly, the initial sync process takes longer than it should. Those who are used to Gmail’s instant update can probably open a Gmail tab in their browser just for the sake of getting the latest update faster. Hopefully, the developer will fix the issues in the next upgrade. Even with those early bugs, I think that Polymail’s unique features are good enough for me to make the app the default mail app on both my Mac and iPhone. But don’t just take my word for it. Try Polymail and share what you think of the app using the comments below. Is it truly the ultimate email client for Mac and iOS?
