TNW’s Apps of the Year: Polymail is the first mail app I genuinely love

In our Apps of the Year series, The Next Web team shares personal recommendations for our favorite apps of 2015. 

I have used Gmail since 2006. I remember how beautifully simple it was compared to the bloated carcass that was Microsoft’s Hotmail. It was clean, simple, a joy to use. It had a spam filter that worked and a clean, easy-on-the-eye ethos.

There have been many apps since then that have tried to simplify that experience, or make it more intuitive. Google’s own Inbox came close, but I was overwhelmed by the radical overhaul of the UI and skulked back to good old Gmail.

Polymail however, has finally cracked a way of making Gmail smarter without confusing the inbox’s owner.

The look and feel is closer to Google’s own Material Design than Gmail currently is; making use of tiles, bold colors and lots of white space to give a clean, light look.

There’s support for multiple inboxes, a read later function and a tracking facility that allows you to keep tabs on your mail recipients. While this isn’t particularly revolutionary, what is noteworthy is the pace of the updates the app’s creators are pushing.

I’ve had an alpha version of the app for little over a week and I’ve already received at least five overhauls, bug fixes and new features, all of which came from users like me. It’s the first time I’ve used an app that improves on a daily basis. It’s also the first time I did this on Twitter.

This is (hopefully) going to be the only time I say this, but @PolymailApp’s email client is a piece of sex.

— Matthew Hussey (@Matt__Hussey) December 15, 2015

Email is a painful part of the everyday. It’s something I try my absolute best to ignore, which mostly leads to me missing stories, or failing to answer messages from family and friends that leave them thinking I’m a bit of a douche.

Polymail splits my social updates from my subscriptions from my press releases, leaving an inbox containing only messages from actual people that I reply to far more regularly than I have done at any point this year.

Polymail, you are making me less of a digital douche bag. Thank you.

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