Note: This page is a review which forms part of the post Windows 10 System Apps Review
What’s this app for?
Remember email? Yes, it’s still going. This is the app to
add all your various email accounts to, so that you can send, retrieve and
respond to your email from the comfort of Windows 10. Worth mentioning that the
Mail app comes bundled/integrated with the Calendar app,
Does it do the job it
was primarily designed for?
Yes. Although it didn’t always do such a respectable job as
it does now. In its early formative days, this was an app about as feature
packed and reliable as a paper bag would be as an umbrella. But times have
changed and this app is now arguably the one app that’s had the most visually dramatic
changes over the months since the launch of Windows 10. To start off with, it
now looks pretty to look at, and has some decent personalisation options:
Setting up email accounts is reasonably easy, although maybe
a little more clunky than it needs to be. There’s an oddness with the defaults for
account synchronisation, which are a bit poor I’ve found. The setting “Based on my usage”
which has no definition of how its calculated concerned me enough to immediately
ignore that and set things to hourly or less. The downside of that default is I’ve
heard from several friends who have thought the app was broken as they had no
emails for ages due to that setting.
Creating and replying to emails works very well in this app,
and is actually a lovely experience with spellchecking built-in, rich text
options (Bold, italics, underline, fonts, highlighter, font colour, font size)
as well as bullet lists, paragraphing options, and even styles built into the
app. That’s not all. Of course you can attach files as one would expect and
insert pictures, but you can also easily insert tables and perform a decent amount
of customisation of them; almost everything you’d expect in Microsoft Word.
The variety and amount of settings that that the app has is
almost unprecedented. Managing accounts is respectable, the personalisation of appearance
as I've said before is very good, but there’s also settings for quick actions
(swiping left/right to delete/archive etc. Useless on a computer however),
automatic replies (when the account supports them), reading customisation,
conversation view on/off (always off in my case!), signatures and notifications
(which is useful for stopping the annoying new email pop-up). And, best of all,
most of those settings have a “Apply to all accounts” toggle, which really is a
masterstroke of time-saving usefulness.
It’s not all good news with this app. Some problem still persist
even after many months. Hitting the sync button manually is an unreliable
experience. Sometimes quick to sync, you’re often left hanging for ages.
Downloading of attachments still seems like a big drag with them often just never
downloading first time. There’s also no preview of attachments. I’m still often
loading up Microsoft Outlook or web-based versions of email accounts to view
attachments quicker than in the mail app. Then there’s the folders issue; you
can see folder in your email account but you can’t rename them or move them
about. On top of that, if you make changes to folders in Outlook or a web-based
client, the Mail App often doesn’t update the folders for ages.
What’s the
alternative?
If you’ve Microsoft Office there’s obviously the very
comprehensive Outlook but free-wise, Windows Live Mail can still work in
Windows 10 and there are always web-based portals to most email accounts.
Hit, Miss, or Maybe?
Maybe; for a long
time I’ve used this as my default mail app but the issues over customisation of
folders, attachments and manual syncing mean I’m often swapping to Outlook or
web-based alternatives most days. It is however, still a mostly reliable and
useful app for email and unlike some system apps, a very worthy and beautiful looking
addition to Windows 10.
No comments:
Post a Comment