Swiping left allows me to set a reminder if the recipient never responds or if I simply want to deal with an email later. The core feature of all three apps is email scheduling. Since Mailbox burst on the scene, Google and Microsoft have spent enormous engineering resources building their own slightly different versions, with Inbox and Outlook respectively. Mailbox was the original breakout email app star, pioneering a super-fast design based on right and left swipes, where users could quickly archive a message or schedule an unanswered email to return to the inbox later. Mailbox took 5 minutes and 8 seconds to send all 20 emails, Google took 7:15 minutes, and Outlook took the longest at 8:48. I found that Mailbox was overwhelmingly the quickest of the top three email apps. So, to measure which app was the speediest, I took a stopwatch and answered the exact same set of 20 emails on both Google’s and Microsoft’s mobile email app, as well as their popular competitor Mailbox, an app purchased by Dropbox in 2013. While both apps offer something unique, I think one way to compare them is based on a single metric: which app gets me to inbox zero fastest. There are two great new mobile-email apps from Google and Microsoft and both offer helpful features, such as location-aware emails and calendar scheduling. I don’t enjoy email - I just want to get my daily digital chore done and get on with my life. For inquires, please email author and publisher Gregory Ferenstein. This post first appeared on the Ferenstein Wire, a syndicated news service it has been edited.

Zero inbox app