Mail Pilot 2 for iPhone – Getting things done within your email inbox
While its been around for years, email is still many people’s preferred means of communication. What’s interesting to me though, is the evolution that has taken place in how people interact with email. In recent years, there as been a push towards “inbox zero“. That means treating your email inbox as a if it was a list of tasks that can be arranged, dealt with, scheduled for later, or ignored with the goal of clearing everything out. The latest app to take this approach toward email is Mail Pilot 2. Check out our video review of Mail Pilot 2 and our discussion below.
Mail Pilot 2 is just one of our favorite email apps for iPhone. We’ve collected all of our favorites here. And if you’d like to see more of our top app selections in different categories, just head on over to our Best Apps Series.
Actually, Mail Pilot 2 is the email app we’ve seen to be most geared toward treating your emails as to-do items. With that in mind, it presents your inbox as a swipe-able interface. That’s right, you can swipe your emails left to mark them as completed. Or swipe them right to schedule reminders to complete them from one to five days later. I really like this swiping system as it’s been used by several of our favorite email apps. But Mail Pilot 2 introduces something new here. If you’d like to delete, complete or set aside an email, simply tap and hold on it. Then other options will pop up allowing you to flick your email towards your desired action. You can also add and email to a like this. Its a sweet way to interact with your emails without ever having to leave the inbox.

Mail Pilot 2 incorporates swipe gestures throughout the interface.
Swipe actions are available from within the individual email view too. Swipe left to view the next message in your account or swipe right to view a previous one. You can also move an email by tapping in the upper right-hand corner. This brings up another cool menu that displays the familiar action items. Composing an new email can be initiated from upper right-hand corner in the inbox view. What I like here is that you can swipe down on a partially composed message which saves it as a draft. These drafts can be accessed in the upper left corner the next time you compose a new message.

Mail Pilot 2 cleverly lets you access drafts the next time you compose a new message.
If you can’t tell by now, Mail Pilot’s entire user interface is super swipe-friendly. It’s also very layered, meaning that swiping down takes you to down to the next lower layer of the interface. So, for example, the inbox view can be swiped down to reveal the settings and search options. One area where Mail Pilot is lacking, at least on initial release, is push notifications. There are fetch notifications that work when you leave the app running in the background. However, it does include a cool Notification Center widget where today’s due tasks are displayed.

Mail Pilot 2 comes with a built-in widget.
I really like Mail Pilot 2 and think is the best option for anyone who loves treating email as tasks. It is also really well thought out in the design department. If those things strike your fancy, give Mail Pilot 2 a test flight today.
Here are a couple of our other picks of the best email apps for iPhone and iPad:

Spark from Readdle – Perfecting email on your iPhone and Apple Watch
