Best iOS Email Apps for Privacy

December 11, 2015 / iOS, Apple, iPhone, iPad, Email, Gmail, FastMail, Dispatch, Spark, Outlook, Boxer, CloudMagic

UPDATE: FastMail wrote about how they sanitise emails to protect their users. I encourage all email app developers to read it and do it properly, while maintaining good layout and readability.

tl;dr The only apps that can protect your privacy are the built-in Email app, FastMail, or Gmail (not Inbox).

One of the first things I did after getting the iPhone 6 last year was to try to find an email app. Unfortunately no 3rd party client met my criteria at the time. With the recent announcement of Mailbox shutting down, people have mentioned Spark as an alternative. Curious whether Spark will finally meet my criteria, or whether any of the other apps have been improved, I set out to re-examine them all.

My Criteria

I’m a happy FastMail user, and I was really glad when they released their iOS app a month or two after I bought my phone. Prior to that every single email app I tried, other than Gmail, failed at protecting my privacy. Although on my laptop I can avoid having my viewing habits tracked by blocking images, every iOS email client I tried failed the emailprivacytester.com test. This test, made by Mike Cardwell, sends an email to you and lets you know what signals your app reveals when you open the email.

For me it is a dealbreaker if an email client cannot pass this test. Whatever nice features the app might have become pointless if it cannot pass this test.

Another minor wish of mine is support for aliases. Wildcard emails is one of the things I love about FastMail, so an email client that can deal with aliases properly is also a very nice plus for me.

Here are my criteria:

How did the top apps fare? Let’s find out.

Mailbox

Mailbox only supports Gmail and iCloud, but I wanted to see if I was using Gmail whether it’d be acceptable. It does handle Gmail aliases, so that’s good. However, I didn’t find any way for me to block images by default. Because of this it fails the emailprivacytester.com test upon viewing an email:

✓ Supports Gmail aliases
✗ Fails emailprivacytester.com test upon viewing email

Spark

Spark have been mentioned as an alternative to Mailbox. Overall it’s a very nice email client. In the Settings screen, there is even a Privacy section where you can block images by default. It passes the emailprivacytester.com test when viewing email, but sadly fails the test when composing a reply.

It’s really, really not cool that random javascript someone sends me can execute at will.

Here’s the full test result:

✓ Supports aliases
✓ Auto detects alias to use
✓ Allows blocking images by default
✓ Can still easily show images on-demand
✓ Passes emailprivacytester.com test when viewing email
✗ Fails emailprivacytester.com test when replying to email

Dispatch

Dispatch is not free and costs $6.99. It’s actually a very nice email client and I bought it last year to test it out. However, I was disappointed. I believe I submitted a feature request to ask for privacy fixes, did anything change? Nope. What’s shocking is that even after disabling image loading, it still fails emailprivacytester.com test. It doesn’t just fail, it fails because it allows javascript execution! C’mon! I paid for this.

It’s unclear whether the ability to execute javascript would lead to security issues. It’ll probably depend on how the email app is written and what the javascript has access to. But at the very least the javascript can signal whatever it wants.

✓ Supports aliases
✗ Doesn’t auto detect alias to use
✗ Fails the emailprivacytester.com test even after disabling the “Load Remote Images” setting

Outlook (Acompli)

Microsoft’s acquisition of Acompli turned it into the Outlook email app. It looks like a nice app in general, but lacks features I’d like and fails the privacy test:

✗ No setting to block images by default
✗ Fails emailprivacytester.com test upon viewing email
✗ No support for aliases

Boxer Pro

After testing out the free Boxer version for a while, I bought Boxer Pro (currently $4.99). I liked the app and features, but once I tested its privacy protection I had to ditch it. While it passes the privacy test when viewing an email, as soon as you try to compose an email it’s game over. Although I might be able to forgive the meta refresh leak, its inability to show images on demand after blocking it by default is really annoying. Also, its HTML email cleaning code isn’t as nice as FastMail’s resulting in hard to read emails after enabling the protection.

In other news, I found out that VMware bought Boxer just couple months ago. I sure hope they don’t shut it down after a while like Mailbox. There seems to still be updates coming out, so I hope they’ll still fix things up.

✓ Supports aliases
✓ Auto detects alias to use
✓ Allows you to set to “High” privacy/security setting
✗ No easy to show images on demand afterwards
✓ Passes emailprivacytester.com test when viewing email
✗ Fails emailprivacytester.com test when replying to email

CloudMagic

I tried CloudMagic after trying Boxer and Dispatch. Unfortunately it didn’t fare very well either. It’s lacking in almost all the basics I want to have.

✗ No aliases
✗ Doesn’t seem to have a way to block images by default
✗ Fails emailprivacytester.com test for viewing email

Cannonball

I didn’t try Cannonball last year, but found it while searching through AppStore. It seems to have many good reviews, so I decided to give it a go. Problem is that it’s also lacking in almost all the basics I want. It fails the privacy test both when viewing email and when composing a reply. There are so many violations including javascript execution. Combined with the fact that it doesn’t support aliases means I quickly ruled out this one.

✗ No aliases
✗ Doesn’t seem to have a way to block images by default
✗ Fails emailprivacytester.com test for viewing email
✗ Fails emailprivacytester.com test for replying to an email

myMail

Many people seem to like myMail too. I remember that I tried this out last year but don’t remember much about it. It looks like they stored my login & password in iOS Keychain because the data persisted after the app was uninstalled. I tested it out again but didn’t spend much time with it. There doesn’t seem to be a way to block images by default, so my testing with it was pretty short. It’s also lacking aliases support.

✗ No aliases
✗ Doesn’t seem to have a way to block images by default
✗ Fails emailprivacytester.com test for viewing email

FastMail

As I mentioned, I’m pretty happy with FastMail’s iOS app. It doesn’t have any dealbreakers for me and FastMail really lives up to the “Fast” in their name. If you ever had the experience of having to manually refresh Gmail, then you’ll know what I mean by fast because I never have to do that with FastMail.

FastMail does have its downsides though. I do wish there’s a snooze feature like many other email apps, but I can live without it.

✓ Can block images by default
✓ Can still easily show image on demand
✓ Passes emailprivacytest.com test for viewing email
✓ Passes emailprivacytest.com test when replying to email
✓ Supports aliases
✓ Auto detects alias to use

Yahoo Mail

I have a @ymail.com account lying around that I never use. I thought I’d take Yahoo Mail out for a spin and see what happens. XSS is what happens.

✓ Can block images by default
✓ Can still easily show image on demand
✓ Passes emailprivacytest.com test for viewing email
✗ Fails emailprivacytest.com test when replying to email

Gmail

The official Gmail app is really good too. Checks all the boxes. I use FastMail, so I don’t use Gmail except for work.

✓ Can block images by default
✓ Can still easily show image on demand
✓ Passes emailprivacytest.com test for viewing email
✓ Passes emailprivacytest.com test when replying to email
✓ Supports aliases
✓ Auto detects alias to use

Inbox

We use Google Apps at work for email, and I just found out that you can enable Inbox for Google Apps now. The interface is nice and helps you to get to Inbox Zero. Unfortunately, no way to block images by default means it’s off my list. What’s also annoying is that once you enable Inbox for your organization there is no way of turning it off.

✗ Doesn’t seem to have a way to block images by default
✗ Fails emailprivacytester.com test for viewing email

Built-in Mail App

If I remembered right, before FastMail iOS app was released I used the built-in Mail app because it passes the privacy test. However, one annoying thing is that once you block images by default, there’s no easy way to show images on a per email basis.

Other than that it also supports aliases as retemirabile commented below. The setting is rather hidden, but it does auto detect the correct alias to use which is nice. Go to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars, select the account you want to add an alias for, tap on Account, tap on Email.

✓ Can block images by default
✓ Passes emailprivacytest.com test for viewing email
✓ Passes emailprivacytest.com test when replying to email
✓ Supports aliases
✓ Auto detects alias to use
✗ Cannot show image on demand

Conclusion

As the tests have shown, if you don’t want to reveal your email viewing activities on iOS, you have 3 options:

  1. Use the built-in Mail app (provided that you don’t care about being able to show images for particular email easily)
  2. Use Gmail but not Inbox (if you have Gmail, or if you want to pipe emails to Gmail)
  3. Use FastMail (if you have FastMail, or if you want to pipe emails to FastMail)

If you want to have more options like I wish I do, please help by contacting the developers and let them know. I’m going to send this page to them in hope that they’ll take action.

I would happily pay for an email app, and in fact I already bought a couple. But an email client that can’t protect my privacy is not something I want to use.

So for now, I pipe all emails that I have from my @gmail.com and @live.com emails to FastMail and use the FastMail iOS app. FastMail allows you to configure SMTP servers such that when I send emails using the FastMail interface, it’ll still use gmail’s server if the from address is @gmail.com.