Molto For Android & iOS Gives Your Email Inbox The News Feed Look
There are tons of email apps available for Android and iOS, but most of them offer similar features and functionality, more or less. Molto, on the other hand, differs by offering an inbox experience that looks and feels more like a social media site like Pinterest or Google+. It comes packaged with several features such as Quick Peek that gives you a quick glance of your messages without actually opening them, Photo Inbox that connects to your Facebook account and carries photos uploaded by your friends, Master Inbox for accessing messages from multiple email accounts under one place, and more. The app has been available on the iPad for a while and was recently released for the iPhone and Android tablets.
Getting started with Molto comprises of the usual sign up process. It automatically detects the Gmail account currently linked to your device, and you can tap it to get through the initial setup even faster. After that, you need to grant Molto the appropriate permissions to your Google account, and you’re done.
The best part of Molto is its Inbox view, which looks quite fascinating for an email app . When I used it for the first time, I found it hard to realize I was browsing my Inbox until I tinkered with it a little bit, thanks to its card-based design. In fact, the UI feels more like a Google+ and Facebook hybrid with a pinch of Pinterest sprinkled over it.
The navigation is simple and intuitive, and everything looks really nice. You can swipe left or right to reveal more messages. Multiple emails can be selected via tapping and holding over a single message and then check-marking the required items along the way. This can prove useful for deleting multiple items in one go, or moving them between folders.
After opening a message, you can reply to the recipient, delete or archive it, or compose a new email from scratch. You can also add the email to ‘Starred’ items to quickly access them at a later time.
Molto also works great with email attachments, letting you attach files to your own emails and download those from your contacts. There isn’t much to talk about the email composition screen though, as it looks similar to that of any other email app.
Molto also boasts a search feature that lets you find specific messages using keywords, contact names etc. Tapping Molto’s icon at the top left corner brings up the navigation drawer, from where you can access your other email accounts, as well as the Unread, Starred, Drafts and Sent folders for each, and an labels that you may have added. The Photo Inbox I mentioned earlier connects your email with Facebook, and lets you view photos uploaded by your friends and family.
Emails have really become an indispensable part of our lives but in the era of the social web, apps like Molto can go a long way in bridging the gap between them and the more recent online communication mediums. The app is available for free on both Google Play and the iTunes App Store.
I’m trying it right now on an iPhone. It really has a beautiful interface. I like the Facebook integration. Now lets hope it pushes mail as good as the default mail app.