techieMusings

I am an Inbox Zero kind of person. For years, now, I’ve used this method. How I manage my inbox is largely in thanks to email apps that allow you to “Snooze” emails. Now, I don’t abuse this feature just to get my email down to 0 at the end of the day! But using the Snooze feature to schedule my emails for a time that I know I will be able to deal with it has helped me tremendously.

I was in love with Mailbox before it shut down. And ever since, I have tried to find its perfect replacement. For the past year, I have been using Spark. Before choosing Spark, I had evaluated Polymail and Airmail. Polymail had a lot of promise when I started using it, but I had issues with syncing and just did not like the overall experience as much as I liked Spark at the time. With Airmail, I was initially so excited at the number of integrations it had, but ultimately found it was not as clean and simple a solution. And overall, I really loved Spark. But in the past couple months, I have run into stability issues with Spark and have found some features (such as Send Later) were lacking. As well, I have not had the best experience with their customer support.

Which leads me to Newton. I have only been using Newton for the past week, but I wanted to share my first impressions in this post.

• My very first impression – Newton is clean and simple! I love this.
• I love that the snooze feature understands written text. When I want to snooze to a custom date/time, I can simply type “tomorrow 10am” and it will come back to my inbox on that date/time.
  • Snooze email tips & tricks
• The left sidebar is hidden by default so that I can focus on my inbox with no distractions. Again, I love how clean this is.
• The gmail keyboard shortcuts that I am used to are supported in Newton.
• When sending emails, I have follow-up options, including:
  • Remind If Not Replied – essentially, this provides the same snooze options that are available with emails you receive. If you choose “remind if not replied,” the email will pop back to your inbox at the time you specify only if your recipient does not reply before the selected time. So no more setting reminders to follow-up on sent emails!
  • Notify When Read
    • Email tracking with Newton
  • Send later
    • Again, I can simply type Thursday at 2pm, or I can use the calendar to choose the date/time I want the email send
    • I can check an option to only send this email if the recipient does not reply before the time I have set.
    • The power of send later
• Sender profile
  • This can come in handy to quickly learn more about the person who is emailing you
  • More on the sender profile in Newton

Unfortunately, Newton does carry a price tag of $50/year. That’s what has held me back from trying Newton before this. I was afraid that I would test it out and really like it. Which pretty much is the situation I am now in :) Paying a little over $4/month for something that will save me time and be frustration-free would be an investment I would be up for; however, there is no guarantee of that which keeps me a bit hesitant. And it is hard to justify the cost when there are free alternatives out there, like Spark. But, I have been more than impressed with my free trial (you get a 14-day free trial). Their support has been super responsive (and I sent them a batch of questions!) and both the Mac App & iPhone App have been very smooth. It took no time for me to get started and comfortable using Newton.

I will mention some things that aren’t available in Newton that I was hoping to see:

• On iOS, there is no way to auto-advance to the next message when you archive or delete. This is available on the Mac version.
• There is no way to insert canned text or to have multiple signatures (though canned text is on their roadmap).
• When you drag/drop an image into your message, it adds the picture as an attachment instead of an inline image. You can right click to insert as inline image, but you do not have any ability to resize the image in that view.

Overall, I am so pleased with Newton! The App is super responsive and quick, which has made me very happy. The search also works well, which was lacking in some of the other email apps I tried. This is super important to me since I search for emails quite often! The keyboard shortcuts offer everything that I need; I’m a big fan of that! Both the iOS and Mac Apps are clean, minimalist, and easy to use. They also both look nearly identical and offer the same functionality. Using Newton has improved my workflow already, and I look forward to continuing to discover more ways that I can streamline things!