Humail ($2.99) is supposed to have a more emotional or humane approach to the colder, heartless e-mail clients of yore, but all it does is frustrate me by forcing me to read very, very slowly. That is admittedly a harsh statement, but I’ve had Humail for about a month and a half now and I still can’t find any way to use it for more than a minute at a time before quitting the app in frustration (or crashing to Springboard).
The elevator pitch for Humail is as follows: what if you could see your e-mail as a vertical CoverFlow-esque flow of letters? The junky, non-personal e-mails could be displayed as regular envelopes and the e-mails from contacts in your address book would appear differently, and could even be filtered (like Gmail’s Priority Inbox).
The visual metaphor for Humail sounds plausible in concept, but it simply doesn’t work for me in practice. I don’t receive an astronomical amount of e-mail and I’ve only added one out of my five accounts to Humail, but even the 10 messages in my Gmail inbox are enough to make Humail a thoroughly disorienting experience. Thanks to the envelope view, I can only ever really see one e-mail at a time, and it’s hard for me to get a sense of how many messages I have to read or reply to.
So maybe Humail isn’t for me. Maybe it’s for people who only get the occasional e-mail and want to read it in a manner similar to sitting down at the breakfast bar and sorting through a pile of envelopes. Unfortunately, Humail likely won’t work out for these users either.
That’s because the app is pretty terrible for reading most any kind of e-mail longer than a few characters (and God forbid that you try to carry on a conversation through this app). Every message I open — whether it be plain text or HTML — ends up requiring horizontal scrolling to read. Two fingers pinches to zoom out do work, but this usually results in very small text, so it’s usually much easier to simply use the built-in Mail.app or Gmail web app.
To top it all off, it consistently takes about three seconds to navigate between menu items, and the app ends up crashing three out of five times I load it up and use it.
There isn’t much else for me to say about Humail at this point. The app, as of version 1.0.3, really doesn’t perform very well as an iOS application when you take its speed and instability into account. However, even if the developers manage to fix these little niggles, I’m honestly not sure how useful the core concept of having little envelopes for every single message in your inbox is. The iPhone already is a small space to managing mail in, but something about Humail’s interface makes everything feel even smaller and squished together.
If you’re really out to make e-mail more emotional, then send an attachment of your own smiling face or a picture of your dog with every message — but stick to the vanilla Mail.app for doing so. Humail tends to bring out all the wrong emotions in me.
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Humail was provided by the Humail Team for review on iSource. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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