Apple Mail

So why bother with the mail app that came with your phone? Because it's already there, it's free, and it does more than you'd think.

It takes pretty much any account. iCloud, Gmail, Exchange, Yahoo, Outlook and plenty of others, all in one inbox or one at a time.

It sorts your mail for you now. Messages go into Primary, Transactions, Updates and Promotions, so the receipt for your trainers isn't sitting on top of an email from your sister.

The handy stuff is all here. Send later, snooze and unsend. On a Mac, an email nobody has answered in 3 days pops back to the top of your inbox.

Then there's privacy. Mail Privacy Protection hides your IP address and stops senders seeing whether you opened their email.

And reviewers like that it stays in step across their iPhone, iPad and Mac.

It's Apple only. There's no Mail app for Windows or Android. With an iCloud address you can read your mail at iCloud.com or in Outlook on Windows, and that's your lot.

Gmail is a sore point. Several Hacker News commenters say new Gmail messages aren't pushed to Mail on the iPhone, so they turn up late. A few moved to another app over it.

An iCloud address is tight on space. Its mail counts against your iCloud storage, which is 5 GB free and shared with everything else you keep in iCloud. When it's full, Apple says new mail stops arriving.

Rules are a Mac thing. One reviewer can't get at theirs from the iPhone, and says they don't sync between two Macs either.

The AI bits have strings attached. Priority Messages and summaries need Apple Intelligence, which Apple still calls a beta and offers in some languages only.

And if your work email is on Microsoft 365, check before you lean on the Mac app. Apple's own guide says the Mac connects to Exchange through a service called EWS, and Microsoft says it starts switching that off in October 2026.

The app is free. There's no paid version of it.

What you might pay for is iCloud+, and only if you use an iCloud address or want its extras. It's $0.99 a month for 50 GB, $2.99 for 200 GB and $9.99 for 2 TB.

Every one of those adds Hide My Email, which makes up random addresses that forward to your real one. Good for the shop you'll buy from once.

They also add Custom Email Domain. That's email at a domain you own, shared with up to five other people. For a family that wants "anything@oursurname.com", $0.99 a month is hard to beat. Apple does say it isn't available in every country.

Need silly amounts of space? There's 6 TB at $29.99 and 12 TB at $59.99.

Already reading Gmail or Outlook in Mail? Then you don't need to give Apple a penny.

Apple Mail has 4.6 on the App Store from about 4.5 million ratings.

A few of the reviews Apple shows aren't about Mail at all. One is a thank-you to a plumber. So we went by the seven that are.

The split is over Categories. In January 2025 one reviewer loved having the inbox pre-sorted into four, after a couple of days of nudging senders into the right pile. Another hated it, though the first says you can go back to a plain list.

Someone else is cross that an update took delete and junk off the left swipe. They also spotted phishing emails landing in Primary, which is not where you want them.

The fans say it's solid and never crashes on them. One tried Spark, Airmail and Outlook and came back.

Hacker News is tougher. A couple of Mac users say search and Smart Mailboxes aren't dependable these days. But plenty still use it as the front end for Fastmail or their own domain.