Canary Mail 4+

Wow......

I'm sick and tired of going back and forth between email applications and I know you are too. I tried settling on Gmail but it does only one thing well, it grabs your emails. I tried using Apple Mail, which is actually one of the better applications but it's not creating new features so to say. I tried Outlook, which is another great application but for me, it's too feature filled for my needs (I highly recommended it though). I've tried Edison, Spark etc. and always came back to Gmail but not any longer. I found Canary!

It's a great balance between personal and professional needs. The GUI is excellent and navigating Canary is as easy as navigating iOS. Like you,I depend on email and use it constantly on a daily basis. I LOVE how it has read receipt power without the receiver knowing) , an easy dashboard, great calendar and it gets granular too if you need that. The price is high at $20 for Pro BUT think about this, it's not a subscription, which is a trend I hate on the App Store and Pro unlocks a bundle of more useleful tools! Go Lite or Pro, either way, you just found your last email application you'll ever have to try!

Could be a lot better...

I am an email power user with multiple email accounts and have tried many paid and free email apps. Web based clients do not provide the functionality I require, namely that I need access to email when NOT ONLINE. This is also where Canary has a serious shortfall as it only “syncs a limited number of emails in order to conserve bandwidth and space”. I have plenty of space available and bandwidth is not an issue when I am able to connect. But location and site security restrictions impede access at times. Tech support cannot answer how I can force a download of my mail. A mail client should be able to access all the mail associated to an account. Another major annoyance is that there is no visual indication that you have replied to a particular email. A lot of clients will show a reply or forwarding arrow to indicate it has been acted on previously. This is not the case with Canary, you need to check your sent mail to confirm and that can be tedious to search through. It is a time consuming annoyance. If you leave the threading of messages on then this is not an issue... but there is a problem with that as well as leaving that on is an issue because Canary cannot seem to keep the local database free of errors and it mixes multiple unrelated threads. You are forced to constantly re-index. There is plenty of room for improvement here.

Lots of great stuff, but an inconsistent foundation

Giving a very hopeful three stars. Love the AI integration (especially with calendar events, but doesn’t work every time), read receipts, tracker blocking, secure sending, and even getting used to the inbox (sorting by buttons above message list), frequent updates with some fixes. Unfortunately as others mentioned, the basic email stuff is not solid and consistent. Notifications are sometimes duplicated, email refresh (I.e., seeing sent emails) is sometimes very slow (both iOS and MacOS) and often requires re-index or re-adding the account(!); if clicked on too quickly after downloading sometimes attachments won’t download and require re-index (!); I can't search all my emails (!!!); smart notifications sometimes allow newsletters, marketing emails and even emails marked as spam get notified (then trashed!); the “for you” button takes a while to recognize new emails (sometimes hours) and the UI is more cluttered than similar paid apps. This would be a decent paid app ala Airmail from 10 years ago but not for $50/yr and in 2024. PLEASE fix the basic stuff on all platforms and for all account types before adding more features! TL;DR: lo cool new stuff but the basic stuff is a little cluttered, slow and janky.

Developer Response ,

Hi, thank you for sharing your feedback and expressing confidence in Canary's potential. Your insights are incredibly valuable to us. We're glad you appreciate features like AI drafting of emails, effective sorting, and Read Receipts. However, we understand your concerns about email rendering issues and the need for better sorting options and AI customization. Rest assured, we're working on improvements to address these issues and enhance your experience with the app in future updates. Please reach out to support in case of further queries at https://canarymail.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new and we'll be glad to assist you. - Canary Mail Team