You’ve got mail

Mailbox (iPhone/Free)

Mailbox is a new e-mail client for the iPhone. But it is not just any e-mail client. The app has generated such great reviews and such hype that there is currently a waiting list of around 500,000 people waiting to get access. All that hype is because the Mailbox is the most lightest, fastest and most mobile-friendly e-mail app created for the iPhone. Available only for Gmail at present and supporting up to five accounts, Mailbox syncs your email from the cloud securely. When you get the mail, you can use a number of gestures to clear your inbox in minutes. This radically new UI lets you swipe messages to archive or trash. An easy chat-like organisation makes scanning entire conversations a piece of cake. You even get a snooze button which will make your new mail go away only to come back at a later time automatically. All you need to do is get the app, reserve your place and wait.

K-9 Mail (Android/Free)

There are many mail clients for Android. But K-9 is special because it is an open-source project and as it is community-developed it is not just always improving, but if you want you can also jump in by suggesting new features, reporting bugs and tinkering with the source code. If you are content to be a mere user you get IMAP push email, multi-folder syncing, flagging, filling, signatures, bcc-self, mail on SD and many more features all for free without any ads. You can sync your Gmail or Outlook emails and can import all your folders and flags.

Sparrow (iPhone/Rs 170, Mac/Rs 595)

Sparrow is the best email client for the Mac. It proved so popular that the makers of Sparrow brought the app to the iPhone on users demand. Using a minimalistic interface, Sparrow makes use of gestures to make sending and receiving emails as pleasurable as possible. Since it supports both IMAP and POP, you get support for everything from Gmail and Mobile Me to Yahoo and AOL and even for any custom IMAP server. Even though it is not free, for the price you pay you get easy to navigate threaded conversations, quick reply button, unified inbox, cloud syncing with Dropbox, priority inbox and a lot more. One of the best features is the Facebook integration which lets you add friends directly from Sparrow.

Inky (Windows/Mac/Free)

Inky is a well designed, easy to set up and a pleasure to use email client both for Mac and Windows. It has all the features that make a client great like unified inbox, IMAP and POP compatibility, cloud syncing capability and a lot more. What really stands out is the ‘sort by relevance’ feature which assigns a vibrant blue drop to important mail, thereby making sure that spam ‘flows’ to the bottom with faded blue drops.