Inbox and threads

More importantly, the Unified Inbox is truly unified: you'll find Sparrow offers other unified sections, including Starred, Sent, and Drafts. For example, if you've got multiple mail accounts and use stars to keep track of items you need to respond to, the consolidated Starred section saves you from jumping between work and personal accounts to find what's important. It's a simple idea — all your important email in one place — that's rare in mobile email apps.

Sparrow smartly uses Twitter's idea of swiping on an individual message to take action on an email without opening it up. Swiping left on an email gives you the options to reply, star, tag / label, archive, and trash inline — no need to deal with Mail's account-specific requirement of either trash or archive. Similarly, the Edit button at the top right of the app gives you easy options for bulk moving, archiving, deleting, and marking as read. Absent in Mail, the nearly ubiquitous pull-to-refresh action can be used in any list of messages in Sparrow.

All your important email in one place — it's a simple idea that's rare in email apps.

One of the app's best UI ideas is its implementation of threaded messaging, which lets you quickly swipe up and down between responses or see an entire email thread at a glance. In the message view, a title indicates which response you're reading and how many are in the thread, and a tap pulls the message back to reveal the entire exchange, whether it's four messages or 40.

composition and attachments

When reading a message, reply by tapping the icon in the top right or the menu on the bottom right or the bottom right menu, which also lets you archive, star, forward, and trash. Noticeably absent is a way to add labels from inside a message; instead, you have to move back a screen and right swipe on the message. Tapping Compose greets you with a full screen prompt for a recipient that requires you to select a contact before moving forward, which feels like an unnecessary extra step. Once you hit Next, you can change the account that you're sending from, by just tapping the the From: line at the top of the screen.

Sparrow doesn't offer the rudimentary text formatting (i.e. bold, underline) that you'll find in Mail, but it makes up for it in its support for image attachments. Unlike Mail, which still forces users to attach images by sending them from the Photo Library, Sparrow lets you add images (yes, multiple image attachments are supported) to a message at any time. From within Sparrow, you can take a new photo or choose one from your Library, and the app gives you the option of resizing images. As far as sending and receiving messages, Sparrow for iOS still lags slightly behind running Gmail in a desktop web browser, but emails regularly appeared 5-10 seconds earlier on my phone than on the Sparrow desktop app.