A new email app—Tempo: A minimalist, healthy email app

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Important logistical details:

  • €100/year or €10/month subscription
  • Only works with gmail at the moment
  • iPhone app is currently in beta; no iPad app yet

Strong points:

  • The design is elegant, purposeful, and well-executed
  • Hey-ish filtering is neat (and manual; there’s no AI trying to figure it out for me)
  • Batching, Sorting, and Focus features are neat

Critiques:

  • No share sheet/no deep linking
  • No rules (although I guess they’re on the Gmail side)
  • Expensive subscription

This is another “strong opinions about email” app. As I’ve said about other email apps: I have no idea who’s asking for these weird features. They’re interesting, sure, and they certainly differentiate the app from the competition, but why design and implement them before you’ve done the basic fundamentals?

Anyway. It looks like the devs have done a good job at what they’re trying to do. It is really sleek and the “healthier email” approach is smart. Maybe it’s the tool for you!

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Nope…

…

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Why would someone want to pay €100/year for a Gmail-only app? (Or, maybe, why would a developer be cheeky enough to demand that freight without providing IMAP access to other mail services?)

Maybe just use Gmail in a browser, or Google’s free app?

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I would probably pay for this subscription if the app had deep-linking/share sheet functionality.

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This app also completely fails if you use any of your own filters/labels, as there’s no way to access them (as far as I can tell).

If you have a Gmail account and all of your email ends up in your Inbox and you want someone to deal with it for you, I guess this is an option?

I’d much rather use Sanebox, personally.

In fact, it was trying Tempo that inspired me to post this:

IMO, Tempo is in ‘alpha’ not ‘beta’… and approximately version 0.1.

But they’ve already sponsored MacStories. So they’re getting money (or have money) from somewhere.

In the end, it’s just not for me.

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We use G Suite at work and I’m sympathetic to what this is doing, but after using it I have to agree it’s too minimally featured. I could see occasionally using it to gain perspective on an unusual deluge of email or just to look at a different color scheme.

I’ve been pretty happy with Mimestream, anyway, plus Mailplane when I need something particular out of the Gmail web interface.

Thanks for posting it! I like that all these options exist.

Edit: actually, Tempo might not be well suited to occasional use if it’s hiding new email in its labels. I’ll see what happens during the trial.

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I didn’t try tempo, but just answering why Gmail only, because there are individuals who have 6 different GSuite account that they need to manage. GSuite is ruling the game in almost every single startup these days.

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I have been using Preside.io and have been really happy with it. Lots of customizations just like MailMate in MacOS.

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I’m seriously considering paying for it. Especially if it uses Gmail’s special apis rather than IMAP, like mimestream does. I will do a bit of digging.

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“Gmail only” nope! 20m characters

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Obviously this is relative to each person’s needs but I wouldn’t care how many features it had, I don’t need to spend $120/year for an email client. :slight_smile:

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Not only this, but if you use their labels, it still doesn’t work.

I had assumed I could use Gmail filters to flow things into e.g., Tempo’s To Do label, but it seems you need to use the in-app features to make this work. Alas.

Correction:

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And it’s only $10/month. :wink:

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That’s euros, not USD! Closer to $12/month, or $15 CAD/month for me. And again, I’d be thrilled to pay it if someone were to actually solve my email app issues.

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Its hard to take them seriously as gmail only for $10/month.

However, if they add IMAP, Omnifocus & Fantastical integration, and full TE support, I would pay their sub.

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And send later! Count me in!
Frankly, the first dev to get there should get well-earned millions.
Again… how can it be so hard?

(No, I will not look at the Mailcore docs again tonight :laughing:)

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A correction: an item needs to be labelled Tempo/To do while still being in the Gmail Inbox. Then it’ll appear in Tempo’s special tabs.