jonathanfrakess: Triage for iPhone review: Quickly curate your email inbox

Wednesday, 17 April 2013

Triage for iPhone review: Quickly curate your email inbox

Triage: Email First Aid is an email client for iPhone by Southgate Labs that makes it easy to to quickly sort through your inbox and remove the noise. Triage is not intended to be a complete client, but rather a simple one with the sole purpose of helping you to quickly curate your inbox in your downtime.

The idea is simple: Triage displays your messages as a stack of cards. Each card shows who the message is from, the subject line, and up to 10 lines from the email. If you swipe the card up, Triage will archive the message, and if you swipe down, it will be marked as unread and remain in your inbox, but never again appear in Triage. Tapping the card will display its full contents.

Although the main purpose of Triage is to either accept or reject emails from your inbox, you can also reply to messages. Unfortunately, it does not offers support for signatures. I understand that Triage is meant to be simple, but if I'm going to be responding to messages, I at least want a signature.

The good

Support for Gmail, Yahoo!, iCloud, and most IMAP
Messages displayed as a stack of cards with no indication of how many there are
Flick message up to archive or flip down to keep
Support for replying to messages

The bad

No signature support
No unified inbox

The bottom line

It's a constant battle for me to stay on top of my inbox and Triage is helping me better manage my seemingly continuous flow of messages. Seeing just a small excerpt of just one email at a time makes my inbox seem less daunting and it's easy to quickly make a decision on whether to keep a message for later or to send it straight to the archives. When I have time, I get to sit down and address a much smaller, less stressful inbox.

Triage for iPhone is a great little email client for people who get tons of email. It's simple, clean, fast, and one of my new favorite apps.