The 7 best email apps for iPhone in 2026

You may be happy with a web app like Gmail when you're at your computer, but when you're emailing from your iPhone, you'll want a dedicated iPhone email app for the job. From notifications to going through mail offline, a dedicated app just works better.

I've used all sorts of email apps on my iPhone over the years, and to find the best of the best, I spent time testing the most popular iOS email apps. Based on my experiences, here are my picks for the seven best iPhone email apps.

The best email apps for iPhone

• Mail by Apple for simplicity and privacy

• Outlook for a balance between simplicity and features

• Gmail for integration with other Google apps

• Spark for AI features

• Chuck for extensive inbox maintenance

• Proton Mail for privacy and security

• Triage for quick and easy inbox maintenance

What makes the best iPhone email app?

For this list, I focused on standalone email apps for iPhone, rather than apps that are really just add-ons for a web or desktop app. I wanted to showcase email apps that could be the only way you access your email if you wanted. An Apple Watch companion app, however, was a bonus.

Since we're focusing on the iPhone, which you're likely using for personal use rather than intense work, I rejected any primarily team-focused or collaborative email apps. While these are useful for organizations, they're needlessly complicated for day-to-day emailing. They also tend to charge a monthly fee, and while there are paid apps on this list, I generally avoided apps that required expensive subscriptions.

Maintaining a clean inbox free of spam and clutter is top of mind for many, so I looked for apps that included some degree of spam filters, cleanup suggestions, and security options. Along those lines, I also looked for apps that had the most efficient and creative methods for email organization—along with productivity features like snooze options and built-in calendars.

Even with all these criteria, there are a huge number of options to consider. So I dug in deep, put them to the test, and determined which ones were more than just marketing hype. As I went through each of the apps, my testing process involved:

• Exploring all available features when composing and sending emails, like send delays, scheduling, and file attachments.

• Assessing how well emails were received on other platforms.

• Gauging how mobile-friendly and effective the app's design was.

• Toying with customization options, like color themes and swipe actions.

• Creating folders and changing filters to get a feel for organizational efficiency.

• Tracking compatibility with major email service providers.

• Checking for AI capabilities, like generating email text or scheduling assistance.

Based on all that testing, these are the best iPhone email apps.

The best iPhone email apps at a glance

Best iPhone email app for simplicity and privacy

Mail by Apple

Apple Mail Pros: 

• Simple and easy to use

• Great privacy features

• Completely free

Apple Mail cons:

• Basic features compared to some other apps

Apple's Mail app used to be underpowered—that's why there's such a healthy ecosystem of alternative apps—but that criticism is now largely unwarranted. Yes, it's one of the most basic apps on this list, but that's an advantage: it's a simple and easy-to-use email app. It handles your email—whether you use iCloud, AOL, Gmail, Outlook, Exchange, or any other POP or IMAP compatible service—without any fuss.

When you open the app, you'll see your email inbox with all your emails in reverse chronological order. Recently, Apple has added categories, allowing you to differentiate between emails from actual people and things like receipts or newsletters. To only see the unread emails, tap the handy filter icon in the bottom-left corner. It's nothing fancy, but it works great.

You can schedule emails and undo sends (both of which come in handy for me because I frequently revise my emails). Another spot where Mail steps beyond just sending and receiving emails is with a VIP Inbox and thread notifications. If you're overwhelmed by the number of emails you receive, it's tempting to turn off all notifications. Unfortunately, that means you might miss something important. Contacts added to the VIP list have their own dedicated inbox that always pushes notifications. Similarly, you can enable notifications for responses to individual email threads if, for example, you're waiting for a reply from customer support and want to know as soon as you get it.

Apple Mail has a few privacy features worth knowing about. Mail Privacy Protection prevents marketers, scammers, and the like from finding out where you're located and whether you've opened an email. Hide My Email allows you to sign up for newsletters and the like using a forwarding address, meaning the company won't have your real address. Features like these are a solid reason to consider sticking with Apple's default email client.

Lastly, Mail offers a decent amount of versatility when composing emails: you can choose between different fonts, change the font size or color, add bullet points or numbered lists, or even indent paragraphs.

If you just need the email basics and want a few privacy tools, Apple Mail is one of the best. Most folks with an iPhone should start by giving it a try—if it doesn't work for you, then you can move on to another app on this list.

Mail by Apple compatibility: Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, GMX, Exchange, IMAP accounts

Mail by Apple price: Free

Best iPhone email app for a balance between simplicity and features

Outlook

Outlook pros: 

• Clean but not underpowered

• Customizable swipe gestures

• Built-in calendar

Outlook cons:

• No support for POP3

Microsoft's Outlook email app—surprising almost everyone—hits the best balance between usability and feature power. It supports all the major email services except POP3 accounts, so you don't have to use an Outlook or Hotmail account to make use of it. You also don't need a paid Microsoft subscription: Outlook is free on iOS.

The Outlook mobile app is a far cry from the desktop app you remember. This isn't a bloated, enterprise product. It's a well-designed, highly functional personal email app that adds a calendar, so you can handle all the extras around email, like scheduling events, in one place. If you're already hooked up with Microsoft Teams, you can even make video calls through the Outlook app.

Outlook automatically splits your inbox into a Focused Inbox, for what it considers important mail, and an Other Inbox for everything else. That, combined with powerful search and the Contacts section that groups together all the emails a specific person has sent you, makes it easy for you to keep a handle on important messages.

The left and right swipe gestures are customizable: you can set them up to archive, delete, reply, move, or schedule (Outlook's take on snooze) emails. And there's even an Apple Watch app so you can check your email on the go.

Plus, by integrating Outlook with Zapier, you can orchestrate intelligent workflows across thousands of apps. For example, you can use AI to analyze incoming messages, turn any messages that require follow-up into tasks in your to-do list, and create corresponding events in your calendar. Learn more about how to automate Outlook.

Outlook Compatibility: Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, Exchange, iCloud, Hotmail, Live, MSN, Accenture, Infosys, Cognizant

Outlook price: Free

Best iPhone email app for integration with other Google apps

Gmail

Gmail pros:

• Integration with other Google apps

• Organized inboxes

• Great search features

Gmail cons:

• Not ideal for non-Gmail email accounts

The Gmail iOS app brings the familiar Gmail web app experience to your iPhone. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how you feel about Gmail.

While Gmail for iOS does support iCloud, Outlook, Yahoo, and IMAP, it's at its best when used with your Gmail account. The iOS app nicely integrates with Google's other services like Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. For example, you can preview any file shared through Google Drive or one of Google's apps. A single tap then either saves it to your own Google Drive, which you can access through the Attach option when you're writing a new email, or opens it in the Google Docs or Sheets app, so you can edit or update it. You can also respond to Google Calendar invites straight from the email, just by tapping on Yes, No, or Maybe. The integrations extend to video chat: instead of needing to download the Meet app separately, you can handle all your video conferencing in-app.

Outside of these integrations, Gmail is still a competent email app. All your emails are sorted into three separate inboxes: Primary, Social, and Promotions. Or, if that breakdown doesn't work for you, you'll find a few different inbox styles in the settings: Important first, which tries to put the emails that matter on top; Unread first, which puts the emails you haven't opened yet on top; Starred first, which puts the emails you've actively starred on top; or priority inbox, which uses algorithms to surface the most important messages. Emails can be snoozed, and if you accidentally send an email too soon—which is easy to do on a phone—you can tap Undo to recall it. And search is, as you'd expect from Google, lightning fast.

By connecting Gmail with Zapier, you can turn your inbox into your command center, coordinating multi-step workflows across your tech stack. For example, AI can analyze incoming messages, identify required follow-ups, and automatically create prioritized tasks in your to-do list. Learn more about how to automate Gmail.

Gmail compatibility: Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, Live, Office365, IMAP

Gmail price: Free

Best AI email assistant for iPhone

Spark

Spark pros:

• Clean and organized inbox

• Excellent AI assistant 

• Many little features for power users

Spark cons:

• Won't work perfectly for everyone's workflows

I'm still mourning the loss of Google Inbox, a short-lived Google application that had some interesting ideas about the inbox. One of them: that emails from automated systems—notifications, for example, or newsletters—should show up in your inbox as a single "bundle," allowing you to focus on emails from actual humans. 

Spark's inbox does exactly this, which brings me right back to the days before Google killed its best email tool. But Spark has more tricks than that. There's the Set Aside feature, which allows you to temporarily put emails you can't yet act on in staging area for later. There's Pin, which keeps certain emails front and center. And there are several other little touches that make email a lot more pleasant to use. 

The real standout feature, though, is the AI assistant. You can use it to ask questions about your inbox and get actual answers. For example: I asked if I sent out any pitches that don't yet have responses and got a response that helped me follow up. You can also ask it what time an event starts and then tell it to add it to your calendar.

Spark is an opinionated piece of software, meaning it will work perfectly for some and not at all for others. Give it a try, though—you might love it. 

Spark price Free; Plus, which offers AI and other features, starts at $10/month or $99/year.

Best iPhone email app for extensive inbox maintenance

Chuck

Chuck pros:

• Variety of inbox views

• Great tool for unsubscribing from newsletters

• AI tools for things like deleting old emails

Chuck cons:

• Can feel overwhelming

What's unique about Chuck is the variety of ways in which you can view your inboxes: by timespan, subject, sender, or the traditional latest email view, all of which I found super helpful in locating specific emails faster.

Unsubscribing from multiple email lists is also quick and smooth if you're a paying user: when you tap on the bottom-right, you're guided to a page with all your mailing lists, where you can select specific subscriptions and unsubscribe from them all at once. The AI Select feature also recommends emails you can delete without reading based on your past behavior. In my case, AI Select suggested I get rid of most promotional emails since I typically don't open them.

The free plan of Chuck should be sufficient for most, but if you want to step up your filters and organizational features, you can upgrade to become a Pro user. I made use of the seven-day free trial to explore this more extensive plan, and I was able to add as many inboxes as I wanted, block senders, and try out Chuck's cleanup suggestions. If you know you need to tidy up your inbox, but you're not quite sure where to start, Chuck will recommend categories of emails to get rid of, including old messages, social media notifications, or even messages that weren't addressed to you.

Another small plus: when composing emails, you can easily add links to text, a feature I've been craving for ages now since the vast majority of email apps don't allow it without some smart workaround. 

Overall, it's a very efficient app with great filtering capabilities, one-tap tasks, and cleanup suggestions.

Compatibility: Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, AOL, Office 365, IMAP

Chuck Price: Free for 1 email account; Chuck Pro plan for $49/year gives you for unlimited email accounts and advanced features

Best iPhone email app for privacy and security

Proton Mail

Proton pros: 

• Strong emphasis on privacy and security

• No ads whatsoever, even in the free version

Proton cons:

• Requires forwarding for non-Proton email addresses

If you're not familiar with using more secure email services, Proton Mail makes the process easy. You can compose an email as you normally would, but if you click the lock button, you'll be asked to set a password to encrypt your email message. Then, once your recipient gets your email, they can click to view your message; they'll be directed to a browser to input a password. You can use this process to send emails securely to non-Proton Mail users, but emails are automatically encrypted if you're sending to contacts who also have ProtonMail.

The only thing that could be a bit of a hassle is that, if you want to access your inboxes from other email service providers (Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook/Hotmail) through Proton Mail, you'll need to set up mail forwarding. But this just comes with the territory of using an email app that's specifically designed for privacy and security. Even the free plan of Proton Mail doesn't allow ads, which means that your emails aren't being scanned to deliver personalized ads as would be the case with other email services.

Proton Mail compatibility: You can set up mail forwarding through Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook/Hotmail

Proton Mail price: Free for 1 GB storage, 1 email address, and 150 messages per day; ProtonMail Plus is $4.99/month and includes 10 email addresses, 15 GB of storage, unlimited messages, and support for 1 custom email domain.

Best iPhone email app for quick and easy inbox maintenance

Triage

Triage pros:

• Tinder-like email sorting

• Extremely easy to use

Triage cons: 

• Not suitable as a primary email client

Triage may be the most simplistic email app on this list, but I'd say it's by far the most habit-forming.

This Apple-only app is touted by its developers as "first aid for your inbox." The format is simple: your emails are presented as "cards" that are stacked on top of each other. You can swipe left on an email to archive it, swipe right to keep it, and tap on the card to expand and reply to it. And that's basically it. It's like Tinder for emails, except (hopefully) a lot more effective.

Of course, Triage isn't necessarily meant to be used by itself. Think of it as a useful complement to your typical, more extensive email software. The main goal of this app is to make inbox maintenance a little more manageable, especially if you're like me and are prone to accumulating loads of emails. 

Triage ends up having somewhat of a game-ish feel to it. If I found myself bored in a waiting room, I could easily pass the time by hopping on the app and swiping away at my pile of emails.

Triage compatibility: Gmail, iCloud, IMAP

Triage price: Free; $9.99/year for a more advanced plan, which includes multiple inboxes

Which iPhone email app should you use?

The iOS email app universe is saturated with options—some excellent, some...not. But with all the choices, one is bound to fit how you use—or aspire to use—email. If you're not sure which one's right for you, try more than one. They all have free options, and it can be fun to experiment with a few different styles for managing email on your iPhone.

Related reading:

• 15 iOS home screen ideas to customize your iPhone

• The best productivity apps for iPhone

• The best calendar apps for iPhone

This article was originally published in March 2019 by Harry Guinness and has also had contributions from Kristina Lauren. The most recent update was in February 2026.