Microsoft Outlook (for iPhone)

Shouldn't email be easier? Given all the amazing feats technology can accomplish, it's a mystery that email remains such a pain in the neck. One of the few mobile email apps making email better is—somewhat surprisingly—Microsoft Outlook. It's surprising because the desktop version of Outlook, while tremendously powerful, has a reputation for feature bloat that would seem to make it incompatible with mobile devices. Outlook for mobile devices, however, is light and flexible. One excellent feature in particular shows a Focused view of your inbox, filtering out emails that probably aren't important to you. This excellent iPhone app also has an integrated calendar, customizable swipe gestures, and other smart features. Plus, it supports many more email accounts than just Microsoft's, including Gmail and IMAP accounts. Because it makes real inroads at making email better, the Microsoft Outlook mobile app is a PCMag Editors' Choice.

Price and Support
The Microsoft Outlook mobile app is available for iPhone (the version I used in testing), Android, and Windows Phone. It's entirely free to download and use. When you set up your Outlook app, you can connect it to a wide range of email services, including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, iCloud, IMAP, as well as accounts offered by Microsoft: Outlook.com, Exchange, and Office 365.

You can also connect the app to storage accounts from Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, and Google Drive for quick access to files you might need to attach to an email.

The selection of apps and services you can integrate the mobile version of Outlook with is impressive, though it doesn't quite go as far as mobile email app Boxer, which also integrates with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Evernote.

Special Features
What really sets the Microsoft Outlook app apart from other email client apps is the Focused view I mentioned earlier. By default, the Outlook mobile app starts you off with this special view of your email, across all the accounts you connect to it. It only shows messages that are likely to be important, while leaving out marketing emails, updates from social media, and other less important messages. The Focused inbox is very similar to the signature feature of SaneBox, only SaneBox goes above and beyond by actually parsing the metadata in your messages to figure out which ones are truly likely to be most important. SaneBox is an amazing service that works with any email program (expect POP accounts), and it costs $7 per month. The Outlook mobile app's Focused view really only separates gray mail and auto-generated messages from other email. But it's free.

There is one other mobile email app that also tries to separate important messages from less important ones, and that's Inbox by Gmail. Much like the Inbox version of Gmail on the web, this mobile app creates new tabs where it automatically sorts emails that are social media updates, promotional emails, and the like. However, it only works on Gmail accounts, whereas the Outlook app can consolidate a variety of email accounts and parse everything in them.

Microsoft made the excellent decision to turn the Focused inbox view on by default. It lets users experience a better email inbox without having to first know about the feature and dig around in the settings looking how to turn it on. If you don't like the Focused inbox, you can disable it from the settings, though I bet the majority of users won't. 

Another way Outlook users can have a better email experience on their phones is by customizing swipe gestures. When you see a message and want to quickly process it, you can do so by swiping it left or right. By default, these actions will either archive the message or schedule it to appear as a new email later, at a time you choose. If you tend to delete more than archive messages, you can change the swipe gestures to map them to different functions. This ability really helps people do something with their email rather than just reread it every time they check their inboxes, and it helps tremendously in the battle against email overload.

Swipe gestures in email were made popular by the Mailbox app, which is due to be retired at about the same time this review will publish. Mailbox gave you four swipe gestures, however, instead of just two (left short, left long, right short, right long). The Boxer app also has four swipe gestures, and you can customize what each one does, so if you really want those two extra swipes, Boxer might be worth the five bucks.

Design and Usability
The Outlook mobile app gives you a few more tools for improving your email experience, too. Along the bottom of the interface are tabs for Mail, Calendar, Files, People, and Settings. I rarely see an integrated calendar in mobile email, so I was thrilled to find it here. People who spend a lot of time scheduling really need to be able to flip back and forth between their email and calendar as quickly as possible. Boxer also has a calendar, as does Seed Mail, although that app is no longer available in the U.S.

The Calendar feature pays close attention to detail. A little arrow in the bottom right corner spins like a compass the farther you navigate from the current day. Tapping it brings you back to today. A menu at the top lets you choose to see an agenda view of only your listed appointments, a one-day view, or a three-day view. Tap the menu, and a list of all your color-coded calendars appears so you can toggle which ones to display in the app.

The Files view is also helpful, showing files from your various email accounts in a scrolling list. You can see the name of the file, when it was received, its size, and the sender's name. There's another app specializing in email attachments called Inboxcube that gives you even more ways to find what you need. Inboxcube's hook is that it allows you to quickly see different kinds of attachments, such as all PDFs or all videos sent to you via email. You can even drill down into a view of only emails that contain links. For my taste, the Outlook app does a more-than-adequate job helping me find attachments, however, showing the most recent ones first.

There's really only one thing I dislike about the Outlook mobile app for iPhone: the design. It's totally functional and completely easy to use, but it's bland. Get ready to stare at pages and pages of black and white text, accented every so often by a little blue or gray. Oddly enough, the design is noticeably livelier on Android. Inbox by Gmail is more colorful, and even the standalone Gmail app (which I rate very highly for Gmail power users) incorporates a little more visual pizzazz with headshots of you and your email recipients when available. The line spacing has a tiny bit more room and the margins are wider in Gmail, and when you compare them side-by-side, Gmail looks a little less cramped. 

Make Your Mobile Email Better
Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for the Outlook mobile app. It incorporates features such as integrated calendaring that are central to a productive mobile email experience. The Focused inbox view is the star of the show. It's a wonderful service for anyone who feels inundated by their inbox. A top-notch designer might be able to make this app prettier, but that's a minor complaint against this powerful, free app. Microsoft Outlook for iPhone is an exceptional mobile email client and productivity tool and it's a PCMag Editors' Choice.