Say Goodbye to Your Cluttered Inbox with These Best Email Management Software Tools
The email inbox, outbox, sent items, and other mainstays of email technology have remained mainly the same from the early days. We compose messages, add subjects, attach files, and tap on send. We read messages, archive, delete, or mark them as spam. If you think about it, email today isn’t that much different from email in 1999. The significant difference is the volume of email we get and what types we get.
Why Do You Need to Use Email Management Software?
Instead of personalized letters from friends, we get an onslaught of project updates, e-commerce alerts, long threads from coworkers, and various other types. Managing email using the email of today requires a new approach, new techniques, and better software. If you’re looking for the best email management software, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve done all the research, so if you’re looking for tips and tricks to stay better organized with your inbox, feel less stressed when you’ve been away from the office for a vacation, or just need to spend more time working and less time in your inbox, you’ve come to the best place to learn more about email management software. In this article, we’ve broken down the expected outcomes of implementing such a solution as well as the criteria for what we deem to be the core features that could be considered.
What benefits will you see when you implement an email management software solution?
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Increased productivity
Because we’re seeing such an increase in the amount of email we’re getting on a given day, getting a better handle on managing your email through filters, automatic organizing, and other smarts help people see increased productivity because they’ll spend less time looking for and responding to messages.
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Decreased compliance costs
With increased email volume, an email management system will decrease the cost of retrieving old messages. By implementing a solution to help manage your email, you’ll be able to easily stay in compliance with whatever regulatory body your organization is under the authority of in your country.
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Decreased cost of legal litigation
As the volume of email has gone up, it’s become a constant discussion in legal litigations. Because email is the primary communication medium, it contains data that could eventually be needed for legal matters. Implementing a proper solution to manage your email will save you countless hours when that situation occurs in your organization.
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Decreased exposure to cyber threats
Cybercrime is growing every year, and the move to remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic has made it even more difficult for company IT groups to maintain security over all of their devices. An email management solution will include built-in tools to protect company resources and communications from various security threats.
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Disaster recovery
An email management solution should help aid in the recovery of a hardware failure. By implementing an email management solution that is cloud-based, companies can quickly redeploy it to new machines if there is a hardware failure. A hardware failure can cause lost productivity, so this process will be extremely important for teams. It should be easy to reimport all the current settings so end-users can get right back to work.
How Did We Rate the Best Email Management Software?
When considering solutions for email management software, we took several criteria items into account when researching to determine the ideal solution for your organization. Our criteria are as follows:
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Security
Because email contains so much information about a company, including sales contracts, upcoming plans, accounting information, and more – it’s crucial that any potential email management solution take security measures very seriously. Company IT officials will need assurances that their compliance policies will be met with any possible solution that is deployed.
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Integration
Unless a company is a brand new one, any email management software will need to easily integrate with an existing email service and have a simple roll-out plan as it goes out to the entire company. Especially because most employees are working from home now, simplified deployment will be crucial for any solution.
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Easy to use
An email management solution is deployed to simplify the process of managing email, so it needs to be easy to use and easy to become an expert. A solution that is aimed to solve one problem can’t be so complicated to learn that it creates more problems than it solves.
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Features
Outside of the core email management feature, does this solution offer any other features to help offset the cost? Especially in a company with an extensive toolset, an email management solution that combines other components into a single solution will be ideal because it’ll simplify operations even more.
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Design
A modern user interface will be vital for a solution to managing an onslaught of email daily. Modern user interfaces help with user onboarding, acceptance, and usage of the solution. Even though it’s a business tool, having an excellent interface will be necessary.
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Operating system support
Because end-users are likely to use many device types, an email management solution will need to work on all device types, including mobile devices. Ideally, many of the solutions and features implemented will be driven from the cloud to work in the background, even if the devices are offline or asleep.
The Best 4 Email Management Software
There are countless email management software solutions available for use, but in our research, we found that four solutions were at the top.
Spike
Since email contains business and personal information, it’s important that any app remains secure. Spike takes security very seriously. Spike is ad-free and does not rent, sell, distribute or monetize on your data. Spike passed a security audit by an independent security evaluator (ISE), and all message data is encrypted using AES-256 encryption.
Another aspect that Spike excels in is with integrating into your existing environment. With many apps, you have to go through a complicated process to get an account created before you begin using it. With Spike, when you launch the app for the first time, all you have to do is sign in with your existing email account. There is no “Spike account” needed.
Spike is extremely easy to use because it looks just like a chat/messenger system. Instead of creating a complicated system for managing messages, it feels like you’re chatting using a texting app.
Spike offers robust email management, but it also adds collaborative Notes, Tasks/To-Dos, Groups chat, and much more. It’s aimed at creating a complete digital workspace.
From a design perspective, Spike’s simplified user interface makes it ideal for an email management system because it makes email as easy as a chat system while removing the clutter from email.
Because most users are using a multitude of devices today, Spike works on Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and even in just a web browser.
FrontApp
Security is a key part of FrontApp as well. In 2020, FrontApp completed its SOC 2 Type 1 audit. The SOC 2 Type 1 audit is an industry-recognized security certification for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. It validates that your data is secure, safe, and controlled with Front.
FrontApp is loaded with features, and if you’re needing a simplified CRM tool, it’ll likely do well and could be recommended to your company’s IT department. It’s quite versatile in all it can do. It also includes a number of enterprise integrations. Some of these might be overkill for most people, though. FrontApp isn’t designed to be a simple tool as it’s aimed at the enterprise. It’s not even really an app an end-user could choose to install. Since it’s a heavy enterprise tool for customer management, email is just a single aspect of it.
From a user interface perspective, FrontApp includes a modern design that’s built for team email, so for groups, it could be a worthy option. It works on Mac, PC, iOS, Android, and the web.
Spark
Spark takes email security very seriously, as documented on their blog. The major challenge is how it links work accounts and corporate accounts together. Once you start an account, any other email accounts you add will automatically be tied together. While this adds some convenience, some IT departments will see it as a security problem.
Spark has numerous third-party integrations, but rollout for a company will be difficult because numerous controls will need to be put into place to avoid work and corporate email accounts being linked together as we mentioned in the previous section.
From a user interface perspective, Spark looks and feels like a traditional email client with its more unique inbox feature being the Smart Inbox where it categorizes emails into buckets like Personal, Newsletters, Notifications, etc. In a lot of ways, Spark feels like a modern take on macOS Mail from Apple. Apple’s mail program hasn’t changed much and Spark feels like a successor to it design-wise. Spark works on macOS and iOS, but lacks a PC and web client. A PC version is being developed, though.
Hey
Like the other apps we reviewed, Hey puts security at the forefront by requiring multi-factor authentication at initial sign-up. The team behind Hey also conducts regular audits as well. MFA is an important feature, but some new users might need help setting it up.
One major downside to Hey is that it’s a closed email system, so its integrations are far and few between, but anything new will likely be in-house. Hey doesn’t support external email addresses, so a company will have to switch completely to Hey’s system to use it. You cannot use your existing email address with Hey without forwarding your old account to your new @hey.com address.
Hey promises a revolutionary approach to email, and it does accomplish that in many respects. The challenge is that is difficult to learn and for someone who is a tech novice, it’ll likely be too much of a change. Many of the features Hey offers can be found in other apps that can be used with your existing email account. Hey does a nice job of keeping your inbox clean (called Imbox) by only letting in the important messages. The challenge for most people is that they’ll have multiple email accounts, so Hey will only be good for their personal one.
Hey’s iOS apps are very well designed, but their desktop apps are much trickier to use. Training will be required on the enterprise side as it’s a completely different approach to managing. Hey works on the Web, Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.
Best Email Management Solution Options Summary
All of the options we reviewed bring a lot of interesting ideas to the forefront for email management software. A lot of the decisions will come down to your needs and what kind of work your team does. If you’re wanting a closed system with heavy automation, Hey brings some interesting ideas. If you want a traditional email with a little spark, check out the Spark app. If you need a CRM tool thats included, check out FrontApp. If you’re wanting the best all-around option for email management, check out Spike. Spike’s digital workspace is great for teams and individual users alike. It can streamline your workflow with Priority Inbox, Spike Groups, collaboration on Notes, scheduled send, snoozed email, and much more. Spike streamlines communications by removing the clutter from your Inbox and lets your entire team move faster while communicating more clearly.
Spike works great for someone managing customer service emails, busy executives, or even just power users who get a lot of emails. If you’re struggling with an overwhelming Inbox, Spike’s email management tools will let you finally take control of it instead of it controlling you. All Spike requires to get started is to sign in with your existing email address, so there are no accounts or solutions to implement for IT. All that’s needed is to install the Spike app and sign in.
Download Spike for Mac, PC, Android, or iOS, start chatting with your team and customers and become an email management expert by lunchtime.
Gain Communication Clarity with Spike
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