The Play Store is getting a new email client. Big deal, right? It's not as if we're suffering for lack of options. Well, MailTime, which debuted on iOS in late 2014, is anything but just another entry in a crowded category. For MailTime, emails are just messages, nothing special. You didn't ask for a bunch of metadata, you just got it. The app parses your emails to separate the actual messages from the rest of the clutter.
The primary interface is, at first glance, much like any other email client. You have a list of threads to choose from. But when you open them up, you see an SMS-esque UI that makes it loud and clear that this is not your father's mail app.
Indeed, it is designed to encourage you to view your email conversations this way. MailTime looks at a few things, like your history with a contact and the content of the message to decide whether it makes any sense to treat it as a conversation. If not, it is sorted into your "all mail" list, at which it can be viewed with a more conventional interface.
When you need MailTime to act like a boring old email client, it can do that for you.
I dug up an old fantasy basketball trade negotiation to give you a better look at how a real conversation can look:
In a situation like this, MailTime can really shine. When I was having this conversation, the fact we were using email was just incidental; there was nothing special about this method of communicating that we needed compared to something like SMS or Hangouts. When that's true, why not just use MailTime then?
For me, I don't use email this way very often–as you can see, I had to go back into 2014 to find a suitable example. I like to think of emails as tasks. MailTime is more for those of you who see emails as conversations. The app hasn't been on the Play Store for long, so you might want to be forgiving with any hiccups, not that I saw any. You can see more about the MailTime concept at their website.
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