Get @ Me: the iOS Email App Landscape, in Brief

Gmail - This is app is so good that Google had to go out and buy Sparrow!  Sense the sarcasm?

Mail.com - A marketing platform.

Mailbox - Nice user interface.

Yahoo! Mail - Who is using this, seriously?

Windows Live/Hotmail Push - How did I know it would have 1.5 stars?!

Mail Pilot - Mail as a to do list.

Safe Gmail Free - Need to enter password to enter the application, supports multiple accounts.

iMail G - Same as "Safe Gmail Free"

Sparrow - Unified inbox

Handle - Just a to do list for now.

Group Email! Mail - Groups, templates, dropbox, various attachments

Mail 2 Group - Language support, groups and attachments

OMP - Exchange only, meeting requests accept/declines, passcode

Mailshot - Siri support, main focus is to create email groups.

GW Mail - GroupWise email client

Cloze - email and social, contacts whitelist, most email systems.

Good for Enterprise - an app for paranoid IT Managers that want to give Exchange to their iPhone employees without really giving it to them.  "Here, use this, its 'good' for Enterprise."

eMailGanizer Pro - for people that use folders and have multiple email accounts, good integration with other apps also

Secure Gmail - More secure Gmail.

Triage: Email First Aid - App for plowing through your email, archive or save for later.

Mail + for Outlook - Outlook email and calendar, some swipe functionality.

Email and Walk - Camera shows what's in front of you in the background while you compose emails.

Better Webmail - Security, multiple accounts, full screen.

Message Finder - Easy searching for messages with several canned searches ie shopping or travel (otherinbox).

Unsubscriber - Easy unsubscribing (otherinbox).

Which Email App Is Right for You?

Recently, Des Traynor at Intercom wrote an excellent guide to the future of email apps. After reading it, I was inspired to make an infographic guide to choosing the right app, since email overload is a ubiquitous problem with various manifestations. 

Admittedly, this is a visual dreckfest, but hopefully not so much as to be unreadable. If I've left your problem or solution off the infographic, let me know in the comments!

From Sendgrid to Silent Circle, 10 Apps to Cure Your Company's Email Woes

Yesterday, I talked about enterprise email apps and services with Dmitri Leonov, VP of Growth at Sanebox, and Will Kelly, Senior Technical Writer and blogger at Tech Republic. The apps we covered:  Divide, Box OneCloud, AwayFind, Contactually, Sendgrid, Silent Circle, Trend Micro, and Sanebox. The hangout is posted in full below. If we missed any you like, let me know!

Sanebox and Riparian Data Present: Third Party Solutions to Enterprise Email Woes

Looked through one lens, the past few years have been good to email. At least once a week, I come across a post on Tech Crunch or Pando Daily or The Next Web or Fast Company built around the thesis that: a) email sucks and b) app X makes email not suck (or suck less, anyways).

And you know what? The authors of these posts are totally right. App X is fantastic--almost as good as App Y!

One problem: App X is for Gmail only.

Another problem: App X has all the IT-friendliness of vintage LimeWire.

Taken alone or in combination, these problems mean that many of these great strides being made in consumer email stand little chance of being mimicked in the enterprise. Which is sad, because it’s our work email that really needs to be good.

That being said, there are a few lights at the end of the enterprise tunnel, a few companies whose applications decrease the email headaches of both the user and the administrator. Because third party email applications not a subject that gets much play, Dmitri Leonov, VP of Growth at Sanebox, and I decided to co-host a Google+ hangout about it. On slate for discussion:

• An overview of functionalities necessary in today’s corporate email environments
• A round-up of our favorite third-party enterprise-minded email applications, including SendInc, Divide, Box OneCloud, AwayFind, Contactually, Sendgrid, Sanebox, and Gander.
• Plus, plenty of time to take your questions and offer recommendations based on your organization’s IT needs

This hangout will take tentatively take place Tuesday, September 18 at 1PM EST/10 AM PST. It is totally free and open to all. Though only 8 people can directly participate, we will be broadcasting live, and the hangout will be uploaded to our respective youtube channels immediately post-facto.

If you’re an IT admin with an email beef, we’d love to see you there! Can’t make it? Spread the word!

Elastic Gander: How Elasticsearch Helped Us Build a Better Email App

So, we've probably mentioned that we're using ElasticSearch to power Gander. What we haven't talked about so much is why, and how we're using it under the hood. When we were building out the back end for Gander, the very first thing we wanted to know is what search platform would meet our needs best. It needed to be powerful and it needed to be fast.  If it had a great API to work against and was easy to set up, well, that's just gravy on top. ElasticSearch had these qualities in spades. The other major platform we looked at was Solr, which, like ElasticSearch, is built on top of Lucene. The two are actually somewhat similiar, with Solr being older and designed more for standard search applications. ElasticSearch is newer, and its API, setup and underlying model reflect this. For the kind of application we're building, ElasticSearch is the better fit.

Elasticsearch works by creating indexes over whatever one is trying to search. These indexes track a subset of the data we want to search, and are organized in such a way so that these searches will be fast. To actually keep track of our data, we store it all in CouchDB. However, we still needed to get our data to Elasticsearch so that it could create indexes over that data. Luckily, there's a pretty smooth way to do it.  CouchDb has a concept called rivers where any changes made to the underlying data show up as a change on the river. The changes go downstream along the river, one might say. Elasticsearch has a river plugin for reading these changes. With the right configuration, any changes to the data we want to search will automatically be propagated to Elasticsearch and reindexed, so our search results will always be up to date.

Gander is primarily Ruby on Rails, and it is there that we create new search requests and display our search results. It needs to be able to interact with Elasticsearch, too. Elasticsearch has a pretty great client-side API, but we didn't want to reinvent the wheel, or tire, so to speak. We're using the Tire gem instead. It lets us make requests and display their results with a minimum amount of fuss. Basically, when a user enters a new query that they want to search, we can parse that query and pass it to Tire. Tire will then use the Elasticsearch API to make the search request on our behalf. It then will return us the search results in a nice format, which we then display to the user on the page. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

And that's pretty much it. Elasticsearch is an easy search platform to work with - besides some distributable aspects, this is a basic overview of our entire search architecture. Questions? Comments? Want to know about some specifics? Contact us!

HTML5 on a Mobile Device: 4 Design Maxims

[Editor's note: Back in July, Sean attended DevCon 5 NYC. These maxims come from a talk by David Kaneda (b t) and Josh Clark (t in) called "Delivering for Mobile."]

Maxim number one: Don't judge a user's intent by his/her device.  The basic error of a lot of mobile design is taking the canonical user to be someone in a hurry, on the bus, or only looking at the phone for a second. Designers limit the mobile user to things that are local and instant, which leads to condescending design and making the mobile app a lite version of the real thing. When you do a media query, all you get is the device context, not the user context. Do authors ship a hardcover version and a paperback version? No.

Maxim number two: Consider the laptop. And desktop. And phablet. (Sorry) The idea behind mobile first should be to front-load all your development pain, not to make something simple and then add features on the desktop. The design should be holistic, and even if you aren't shipping to them now, you should start considering the wider world of desk-nots: kiosks, watches, thermometers and other things that aren't desktops, but aren't phones, and may not really be mobile in any conventional sense.

Maxim number three: If there's a scent, users will chase it. There's a perception that the only way to get people to pay attention is to shove everything on the screen at once, but they are actually willing to interact with you, as long as you can give them confidence that you can deliver.

Maxim number four: Keep the originals Image selection should be server-side. Get really high-res originals, then downgrade them for smaller devices, and sniff the user agent on the server (or in js) to pick which one to serve. (This is what magazines do, for example. They store the raw version of everything and the printing process is responsible for making it bad enough to print small and cheaply. So when Time does retrospectives, it can print everything better today than it was thirty years ago, because they have great originals and better printing tech.)

Mo' Data, Mo' Problems, E06: ActiveSync

Ever read Outlook email on your phone? You can thank Exchange ActiveSync for that. Here, we talk about how the protocol works, and what it's like to work with. How do we know this? Because Gander uses it. What is Gander? See for yoself: http://gander.io

To Push or Not to Push: The Merits of Push Notifications in Mobile Email Apps

She was like, "I'm a pusher, Cady. I'm a pusher." What does that even mean? Like a drug pusher? Probably.

How much do you want to bust out Mean Girls now? Vintage Lohan, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and 2000-calorie energy bars! You’re welcome.

Anyways, as we brick-by-brick our email client, I’ve been busy checking out successful and less successful players in the email improvement space. Initially, my goal was to ferret out features that are present in the former camp and lacking in the latter. Some of the popular features are in the reminder/scheduling camp, including the abilities to defer an incoming email for a later date and schedule a response for a specific date. Some are in the prioritization/categorization camp, whether it’s a simple spam/graymail/important or subject-based categorization. There are also the in-line activity, readability, and unsubscribe-me camps.

And then there are push notifications. For those clients and services with mobile options, push seems to be the most cited indicator of “should I buy it?” AwayFind’s value is built on (a filtered version of) push. Sparrow, the very popular iPhone Mail app replacement, currently only has it for jailbroken iPhones (and just came out on the losing end of a 16,000 signature campaign asking Apple to grant them VoIP privileges).

For third party iPhone apps the dilemma with push notifications is security: since Apple doesn’t allow third party access to the VOIP API, apps that want push are forced to store user data on their own services. In this age of data breaches and DOS attacks , it’s easy to see why third parties, particularly fledgling ones, are hesitant to go with this option.

Security aside, there is another reason not to enable push notifications for email: like Josh Smith, I find them intrusive. I’m a big believer in the twice (okay, sometimes thrice) a-day inbox check—I find I’m much more productive when I don’t have my unread count sneering in my periphery. If you get massive amounts of email, this method most likely will necessitate a prioritization service—Sanebox’s seems to be the best.

Obviously, there are some instances where I do need to be on standby, and for them, I like to use AwayFind’s SMS option, since the service allows only emails from a select group of people to get through.

Does this mean our own mobile email client won’t support push notifications? I can’t say. We will be storing user data on our own servers, so enabling push is technically feasible, but the decision will probably in large part be user-determined.

Do you currently/have you ever enabled push notifications for your mobile email? Do you think it’s a necessary feature? Weigh in in the comments!

MIT CIO Symposium: Migration, Online Education, and Letting It Bloom

[caption id="attachment_960" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith"][/caption] For the second consecutive year, I attended the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Unfortunately this year did not meet last year’s level of engagement. By an informal show of hands, only 1/3 of attendees were CIOs – the majority were vendors, consultants and press. Also, since lunch was split into three sessions, there wasn’t as much opportunity to network informally (in contrast with last year, where I was able to have an extended conversation with the CIO of a major French bank.)

The morning sessions, at least, were productive. Some highlights:

Master the Three Management Imperatives for the Next Decade

• Moderator: Gary Beach, CIO Magazine
• Panel: Shouvik Bhattacharyya, CEO Valtech, Scott Griffith, CEO Zipcar, Jeffrey Markley, CEO Markley Group, Dr. Richard Soley, CEO, Object Management Group
• Beach: “Gmail was built in a day. Now I know why the user interface is so bad.”
• Soley: “Cloud is the fastest growing technology in 23 years, more than mobile.”
• Griffith: “95% of Zipcar users have smartphones. 60% interact with the site by smartphone.”
• Bhattacharyya: “Women are 31% more productive than men on days of cricket matches.” This makes me especially proud that we’ve finally achieved gender parity when Riparian Data and SoftArtisans employees are counted together. (That only took 15 years.)

MIT’s Perspective on the Untethered Organization

• Moderator: Jason Pontin, Editor MIT Technology Review
• Panel: Prof. Anant Agarwal (major driver of edX), Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson (whose Big Data class I attended last month), and Joichi Ito, Director of MIT Media Lab and venture investor.
• Ito had the most memorable advice: Don’t waste $100k fixing an existing $100k investment. Start over.
• Ito and most modern VCs spread their portfolio across a multitude of smaller investments, not knowing which will bloom into a Twitter or Kickstarter. The panel considered this the “letting 1,000 flowers bloom” approach. I didn’t see it that way – instead plant 1,000 seeds, only a few of which will actually germinate. Of the few that germinate perhaps only one will turn into a billion dollar company. That one success (“home run”) will more than make up for all the other investments. Ito claims to currently have over 200 investments so clearly he is putting his money where his mouth is.
• One my favorite lines for the age of Lean Startups: “If you don’t release something you are embarrassed of, you waited too long.” Doing experiments to test idea viability is cheap, on the order of $30k, or less than the travel expenses of many executives in the room for just this symposium. Since it is so inexpensive these days, don’t raise money until your idea has traction.
• “It’s all about gaining users quickly and iterating, without central planning.” Evolve and evolve again.
• Agarwal is now a huge fan of the cloud, galvanized by his experience with an MIT edX course. In their wildest dreams, they hoped for 5,000 signups. Instead, they had 120,000, which is more than the total number of degrees awarded by MIT since the university’s inception 150 years ago. For Agarwal, education is “the ultimate tethered enterprise” as students and faculty are planted in classrooms that haven’t changed since the first university lectures in Bologna. edX is attempting to change that by educating up to one billion people online.
• As always, Jason Pontin runs a great panel.

Dual Mandates of the CIO

• Moderator: Michael Hickins, CIO Journal, Wall St. Journal
• Panel: Christian Anschuetz, CIO, Underwriter Labs, Steven John, CIO Workday, Bill Krivoshik, CIO Time Warner, Frank Modruson, CIO Accenture, Thomas Sanzone, SVP Booz Allen Hamilton

By 11:15, it was a relief to finally hear from CIOs directly. Unlike the academic previous panel that tried to push change forward, this group was far more pragmatic and business focused. It was a healthy contrast.

Some takeaways:

• “The problem is not legacy, it’s the memory of the pain it took to get there.”
• “Economics of migration to a new toy is tough when legacy costs decrease [and depreciate] every year.” Accenture has apparently moved all email and SharePoint to the cloud, which is the biggest migration to date. This is not that surprising given how geographically disperse they are and their close relationship with platform vendors such as Microsoft. They provide access to over 90,000 mobile devices of which 70% were employee purchased. All 11,000 iPads were employee purchased. “IT budgets have freed up as business lines and individuals buy IT themselves,” said Sanzone. “Employees have two mobile devices. One we bought them, and one they use,” said John.
• Best line of the panel was by Anschuetz: “I never feel alone in the cloud.”
• He had a close second: “Email is one of the biggest productivity sinks and distances us from our customers.” At Riparian Data, we share his sentiment, which is why we are working hard to fix email.

At the end of the day, the measure of a technology is how it improves our relationships. Email is painful, yet it is not going away any time soon due to its strengths of ubiquity and asynchronous nature. If email could be made dramatically better, the world will be a better place.

Lastly, a quick buzzword alert: "opex" vs. "capex." Most organizations prefer a variable operational expenditure as facilitated by cloud technologies, instead of a high initial capital expenditure on rapidly depreciating assets.

Inside Internet Week NY

[caption id="attachment_925" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="AOL Ventures' Sweet Pad"][/caption] I spent much of this week scurrying between my office and the Internet Week NY headquarters (they're both in Soho, so the scurrying wasn't too draining). IWNY is a conference (and a slew of parties, meetups, and office tours) for anyone whose job, company, or both are on and of the internet.

I averaged between 2-3 sessions a day, and they covered everything from mobile application design to customer acquisition in emerging markets. For all the hype words bandied about ("viral," "destructive," and "shareable" were popular lip-lockers), there was a lot to glean from the sessions, which were taught by some of the city's most innovative tech and marketing brains. The following are some of my favorites (repurposed from my twitter feeds):

On product design: Source: Design and the Mobile Startup: NYC Edition

• .@bartjstein: talking to people about other apps (even barely-related ones) they use can be really helpful #iwny
• .@groupme's initial feature decisions were entirely based on user feedback @smart #iwny
• .@akko: " 'Research' is often a dirty word at startups" @internetweek#iwny
• First six months of @groupme: taking it out to the bar, using it, fixing it in the am. @internetweek @iwny
• Best way to birth a startup: solve one of your own problems. @smart#iwny

On mobile app design:  Source: Design and the Mobile Startup: NYC Edition

• @etsy decided the mobile website was a higher priority than the native app. @internetweek #iwny
• Challenge: @etsy's mobile app had to work for sellers as well as buyers @leland @internetweek #iwny
• Because the mobile space is so crowded, focusing on your brand and identity first can be a strategic advantage @bartjstein @stamp#iwny

On customer/user acquisition: Source: Future CMO Forum @ AOL Ventures

• How to acquire users at an MVP level: get out on the street and talk to people @corbett3000 @mjrawth

On international customer acquisition:  Source: Riding the Wave: Customer Acquisition in Emerging Markets

• .@paulgollash: "offline media is really powerful in emerging markets" #ridingthewave #iwny
• Really imperative to localize branding and copy @danosit @david_reich @paulgollash #ridingthewave #iwny
• @paulgollash: growth of mobile-equipped middle class in emerging markets spells #gametime for online/mobile education #ridingthewave #iwny
• .@paulgollash: rate of smartphone penetration in emerging mkts over past 6 months is far greater than even the smartest analysts predicted
• .@david_reich: Pay attention to terminology and tech preferences: mobile number instead of user name, hotmail instead of gmail #iwny
•  .@paulgollash: International isn't one strategy #ridingthewave #iwny

On roles in a tech startup: Source: Design and the Mobile Startup: NYC Edition, Future CMO Forum @ AOL Ventures

• .@leland: all the designers and project managers @etsy know how to code. @internetweek #iwny
• What does it mean to be a designer in the mobile space? @bartjstein: "hire someone smarter than you." @internetweek
• . @smehmood: engineers and marketers need to have an ongoing dialogue #futurecmo #iwny
• @stamp's three pillars: design, engineering, marketing @bartjstein #iwny

On digital marketing: Source: Future CMO Forum @ AOL Ventures

• @tmrly: some of your marketing should be on the big 3, and some should go towards experimenting on newer/more niche platforms #futurecmo
• @foursquare is working with brands to put digital layers on physical objects (fridges, dog food) @smehmood #futurecmo #iwny
• .@leland: analytics are a form of gamification, because they provide a full feedback loop. @internetweek #iwny
• GE has a smart approach to platform-appropriate content-- factory photos on instagram, games on Facebook, fun facts on twitter#futurecmo
• Lesson from @stepoutnow: if a portion of your site traffic is coming from regions beyond your focus, expand (or shift) your focus.@danosit

On branding: Source: Design and the Mobile Startup: NYC Edition, random man at lunch table

• OH: "always a red flag when the guy's name is in the name of the company" @internetweek #iwny
• Because the mobile space is so crowded, focusing on your brand and identity first can be a strategic advantage @bartjstein @stamp#iwny

On virality: Source: Getting Users through Virality

• An algorithm for predicting branded video virality: congruency, emotive strength, network involvement ratio, paired meme synergy @bpousman
• .@bpousman's talk has me wondering if Dr. Coker's BVMP algorithm could be used in an @ainsights scenario #iwny
• How to shrink the purchase loop: get key f/f/brand loyalists to use, enjoy, bond, advocate, get others to buy @bpousman #iwny

On search: Source: Search & Social: A Love Story

• Can't speak for Bing!, but #searchplusyourworld is super drecky (62% @mashable readers agree) @toddwasserman #iwny
• search mindsets: 50% answer me (siri), 25% inspire me (interest), 25% educate me (webmd) @laurasalant @toddwasserman #iwny
• .@laurasalant: "People are online because they want to find something to help with their offline lives" @internetweek #iwny
• People are using social networks for answer me searches--but the answering depends on a smaller collective intelligence@toddwasserman #iwny
• Who/what do you turn to for rec's: F/F, strangers' reviews, or algorithms? (I think the last takes first two into acct) @toddwasserman

On geotargetting: Source: Search & Social: A Love Story

• Geotargetting: useful or creepy (or both)? @laurasalant @toddwasserman @datadivadally #iwny
•  .@laurasalant: "most important thing marketers should understand about mobile search: geotagged personalization" @internetweek#iwny

On privacy: Source: Future CMO Forum @ AOL Ventures

• All @foursquare apps require explicit consent @smehmood #futurecmo #iwny

On IPOs Source: SecondMarket WalkaboutNY Tour

• You now have to be a billion dollar company to go public"@secondmarket #walkaboutny #iwny
• Previously, avg time for a company to go public was 4 yrs. Now, it's closer to 10. @secondmarket #walkaboutny #iwny

On digital media: Source: Keynote Conversation with The New York Times' David Carr & Brian Stelter

• .@carr2n: "Newspaper will hang around as a piece of intellectual jewelry" @internetweek #iwny
• .@carr2n: Blogging vs long-form is like a buddy movie, except the young gun ends up performing a mercy killing on the elder @internetweek
• The a la carte consumption model, which is now used by so many TV watchers, may work for news media as well @brianstelter
• Twitter serves as a cue that a story deserves blog- or even print-service @carr2n @internetweek #iwny
• .@carr2n: "You shouldn't break news on Twitter unless you have no other option" @internetweek #iwny
• .@brianstelter: Web can be used to give extend the shelf-life of a previous story @internetweek #iwny
• "What's in print--it picks up additional luster, it picks up additional heft...it does better on twitter" @carr2n @internetweek #iwny

Cease@Fire: The Top 5 Email Rants

[Image via Lifehacker]

What we think of as email has been around since 1972, when Ray Tomlinson devised a format for inter-computer message exchange: from user@computerA to  user@computerb. We’ve been ranting about its effect on our lives and sanity ever since.  Or, maybe not ever since, but email was certainly a popular gripe topic well before this past March, when Paul Graham published his clarion call to startups: “replace email.”

This is one of those ideas that's like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. On one hand, entrenched protocols are impossible to replace. On the other, it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now?

Why not now indeed. But until it does (we’re working on it), I’ve collected a fine selection of email rants so that, when you’re in knee-deep in cc hell, you may know you’re not alone.

You’re welcome.

1)   “2433 Unread Emails Is an Opportunity for an Entrepreneur”

1. Author: Michael Arrington (Founder, TechCrunch)
2. Gist: Oh yee of time and willing brains, please create a service that notifies me when any important messages hit my ‘box.
3. Money quote: “The long term answer to all of this isn’t that people need to try harder to respond to communication requests. The long term answer is that someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages. If I knew what that solution was, I’d quit this blog and go do it. Someone out there, though, has the beginning of an idea on how we can better manage our electronic communications. And he or she may someday turn that into a product and save us.”

2)   “Email Bankruptcy”

1. Author: Fred Wilson (Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures)
2. Gist: I will never read most of my email. I have an okay, three-part system for ensuring the messages from the 30 most important people I correspond with get read.  The rest is noise, even if it’s not.
3. Money quote: “… I struggle with email. I hate it but I cannot operate without it. I have gotten hundreds of suggestions on how to become more efficient with email and I have adopted many of them. But the more efficient I get with email, the more of it that comes in.”

3)   “Coping with Email Overload”

1. author:  Peter Bregman (CEO, Bregman Partners)
2. gist: Our addiction to checking our inbox makes us inefficient. Scheduling a specific time each day to “bulk process” email results in a much more focused and productive workday.
3. Money quote: “We are most efficient when we answer email in bulk at our computers. We move faster, can access files when we need them, and link more quickly and easily to other programs like our calendars. Also, when we sit down for the express purpose of doing emails, we have our email heads on. We are more focused, more driven, wasting no time in transition from one activity to another.”

4)   “One of the Biggest IT Companies in the World to Abolish E-mails”

1. Author: Peter Allen (Reporter, Daily Mail)
2. Gist: Citing email’s massive time suckage, Theirry Breton, CEO of IT company Atos, is giving employees 18 months to replace it with phone and in-person meetings, plus “tightly controlled” IMs.
3. Money quote: ‘The e-mail is no longer the appropriate tool. It is time to think differently…If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word.”

5)   “I'm Quitting Email”

1. Author: MG Siegler (Partner, CrunchFund)
2. Gist: Email is a broken, life-draining communication system. What will happen if we pull a Peter Gibbons and just stop responding?
3. Money quote: “It’s not that I really want to blow people off. It’s that email blows. There has to be a better way. And I think there is! If people really need to get ahold of me, they’ll know how. There are many options. And all of them are better than email in its current state (come on Gmail Lite, come on!).”

Mobile Email is a Sea Change not a Subunit

Big (good) news is afoot at Riparian Data, though I can’t spill the beans quite yet. Which is hard for me, as I am terrrrrible at keeping secrets. But, I can say that we are doing something pretty groovy with mobile email, and, as such, I have been spending a fair amount of time learning about the current and predicted states of mobile email.  Some of this learning has been through one-on-one interviews with high volume (read: 300+/day) email users.  I know. 300 emails a day, and a significant number are important and a significant number of the important ones require a response and, sometimes, a significant number of these require a detailed response. Meaning that those horrifying stats about people spending half their day dealing with email are true. Heck, some of the people I talked to spend most of their days and much of their nights scanning, triaging, and responding to email. This would be harder to do if we weren’t able to get email on our phones, but having 24/7 access to email is not all roses and daffodils. For one, it means that we never escape it. For two, the mobile email experience tends to be so glunky that any action requiring more than a quick reply (an advanced search, say, or a lengthy reply), is often shelved for later. And later doesn’t always come. Anyways. I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know. But, did you know that Apple devices account for 85% of all mobile email opens? Me neither. I got that stat from an excellent state-of-mobile-email infographic put out by mobile research firm Return Path. Below, I’ve culled a list of other standout insights from the aforementioned infographic, comScore’s 2012 US Digital Future in Focus report, and MailChimp’s Email on Mobile Devices study (thanks to Sean for this last one).

• 41% of mobile device users access email on their phones.
• In the US, mobile email users grew by 19.5 million in 2011.
• By the end of 2012, more people will be reading emails on a mobile device than on desktops or on webmail
• 64% of mobile email users check email on their phones daily.
• 72% of the mobile email users Mailchimp surveyed read their emails in bed.
• 87% of mobile email users Mailchimp surveyed read their work and personal emails together.
• Among 18-24 year-olds, use of webmail clients declined by 34% in 2011, while use of mobile email increased by 32%.
• During the weekday, desktop clients are the most popular email reading devices. During the weekend, webmail and mobile are more popular.
• Among the mobile email users MailChimp surveyed, Gmail is the second most popular mobile email client, after the built-in mail app.
• 63% of Americans and 41% of Europeans would either close or delete an email not optimized for mobile. (Hear that, marketers?!)
• Only 2.39% of individuals  would open the same email message on both mobile and desktop/laptop devices.

How do you use email on your phone? What do you like/loathe/wish to change about the experience?