LIFE HACK
Get to inbox zero
Even in a world filled with GIFs, FaceTime and the ability to turn yourself into an animated Memoji unicorn, good old email remains a big part of day-to-day communication.
While everyone has different needs, we all share the same goal: ploughing through it as fast as humanly possible.
Here are two apps to help you manage your email and possibly, maybe, potentially even get to the mythological, all-caught-up promised land known as inbox zero.
Airmail: the way to stay in sync
If you have multiple Apple devices, you can’t do much better than using Airmail across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.
This spiffy Apple Design Award winner neatly integrates Siri, Siri Shortcuts, Spotlight Search, drag-and-drop on iPad and more into your workflows – and it seamlessly syncs your accounts, mail and preferences across everything.
Airmail helps with email maintenance too, putting more than a dozen quick actions (Snooze, Send Later, Send to Calendar, Create a To-Do, Create PDF) at your fingertips. There’s even a Bounce option, which replies saying your email doesn’t exist – helpful for avoiding spammers, bots... and exes.
Spark: email that’s faster than you
Spark by Readdle features a Smart Inbox that sorts email before you ever lay eyes on it, automatically separating what’s important from that “special coupon offer” that expired in 2009.
By grouping similar emails, Spark lets you flush unwanted mailing lists and social media notifications in one fell swoop – a tremendous head start in zeroing out your inbox.
For teams and businesses, Spark offers group email capabilities, so you can compose messages in real time with colleagues or comment privately before you respond to a group thread.
And with templated replies (“Thank you” or “See you then” or, hypothetically, “Please take me off the thread for this meeting that clearly doesn’t involve me.”) you can blast through your mail in a hurry.