[Note: Version 1.3 of Mailroom removed the top bar and made the whole app a heck of a lot more usable for single-account Gmail users. Details here.]
Mailroom is an app best suited for Gmail users who make use of multiple accounts on a regular basis. Whereas other apps support multiple logins with clunky extensions or in-app purchases that feel tacked on, developer David Martorana has built an entire room for your various Google Mail accounts, so that navigating between them on your iPhone is no longer a cramped and disjointed affair.
It ‘s also refreshing to see a ‘native ‘ Gmail client for the iPhone that doesn ‘t have the word ‘Gmail ‘ and a common letter (i) or word (Push) attached to it.
Mailroom
One crucial feature that is simply unavailable in the default Gmail web app is the ability to manage several Gmail accounts: you can forward all sorts of account to your Gmail and manage them all in one inbox, but there isn ‘t any option to choose which account to send an e-mail from. Mailroom works around this issue by allowing you to load multiple accounts within the app in a manner similar to the default Mail.app. It also allows you access to your iPhone ‘s address book, which can come in handy because you likely keep all of your contacts on your iPhone, but not on all of your various work and personal e-mail accounts.
Mailroom loads quite quickly right now (supposedly even faster with the next update), and the inbox (shown with extra contrast) fades onto the screen as it loads. E-mails are viewed just like in the web app, although there are also extra view modes so that you can enjoy HTML e-mails in all of their in-line picture glory. You can also instruct the app to allow state saving in order to remember which inbox you were in when you last loaded the app (or you can have Mailroom default to the Accounts screen).
Top Bar
One of the most pronounced elements of the app is the top bar, which sits above the regular Gmail interface. This top bar currently only supports a couple of context-sensitive buttons: one to return to the Accounts screen, one to access the iPhone address book, and one to select the viewing mode for e-mails (HTML view, in-line image view, or plain text).
The accounts button makes it ridiculously easy to fly in and out of your various Gmail accounts, but it can actually take quite a while to get used to. The problem is that it sits in the exact same space that the ‘Inbox ‘ button would normally take up, and so I often find myself heading right back to the accounts page when all I meant to do was head back to my inbox.
I ‘ve asked David about the possibility of making this top bar a bit more context sensitive (so that it shows Inbox instead of Accounts, for users who only use one Gmail account), and although he would like to implement such a feature, he wasn ‘t able to make any promises. If a flexible top bar proves impossible, I ‘m hoping a future update will simply allow me to hide it altogether, since it does take up valuable screen space.
TrueNew
The other major feature of Mailroom is the concept of TrueNew, an optional unread counter that will only show a tally of the messages that arrived since you last loaded the app. This is very useful for people who tend to use the inbox as a task list, and use unread e-mails as unfinished tasks. I tend to star my important e-mails and archive them when I ‘ve acted upon them, so I haven ‘t really found a use for TrueNew, but it’s still a fantastic and brilliantly realized idea.
No Push
The only major flaw in Mailroom is the lack of push notifications. The app currently works with Boxcar for push e-mails (with Open Email Notification Using set to mailroom://youraddresshere@gmail.com), but I find this setup clumy at best, since I always end up having to load Mailroom before the Springboard badge will update. I ‘ve also had some problems with Boxcar not updating in a timely manner, and I ‘d much rather have a push service that ‘s native to the app. However, app-specific push notifications usually end up costing an extra fee, and there are very few apps that offer free Push with the purchase.
Conclusion
I love almost everything about Mailroom’s presentation, but the top bar simply takes up too much space for features that I don’t need on a daily basis (HTML view is extremely handy, but I don’t read too many large e-mails on my device). There is definitely a lot to love here if you frequently manage or write e-mails from different Gmail accounts, but for a single-inbox user like myself, I’m probably better off using another app like Gmail Push — at least until Mailroom’s next major update comes out.
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Mailroom is available for $2.99 on the App Store.
The app was provided by David Martorana for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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TAGS: gmail, web app
