When comparing Airmail vs Boxer, the Slant community recommends Boxer for most people. In the question“What are the best Gmail clients for iOS?” Boxer is ranked 6th while Airmail is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Boxer is:
Swipe a message to the left to archive, swipe right to place it in a to-do list.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Clean interface
Airmail has a very clean and modern interface. On the left side of the screen are the folders (inbox, starred, draft, sent, snooze, trash) and on the right side the email threads for the folder currently being viewed.
Pro Automatically syncs settings between devices
If you are using Airmail in different devices (either MacOS or iOS), you can automatically sync settings through iCloud.
Pro Fast and easy setup process
Even though there's a huge amount of settings available, it's quite easy to get used to each of them and the setup process is very fast and easy.
Pro Consistent interface between devices
Airmail is available for both iOS and Mac, for people who use Apple's mobile devices. And the interface between both platforms is quite consistent, making it easy to seamlessly jump between one and another.
Pro Integrates with multiple third-party services
Airmail can integrate with multiple Cloud services for syncing, creating backups, adding tasks and more. Some of these services include Dropbox, Box, Fantastical, 2DO, Todoist, Wunderlist etc.
Pro Support for VIP folders
VIP folders are for particular senders which you always want to read even when you are ignoring email. The way it works is that you add different senders as VIPs and emails from those senders will always be surfaced on top of everything else.
Pro Extremely customizable
Instead of forcing the user to work with their email the way Airmail developers would want, it allows the user to customize and make the email client work the way they want because of the sheer flexibility of the application.
There's a lot of settings available in Airmail with which you can customize almost every aspect and functionality of the app. In fact, it's very easy to get lost in them and spend a lot of time tweaking and customizing everything to your liking.
Pro Supports Gmail shortcuts
Pro Multiple ways of sorting emails
There are multiple ways to sort emails with Airmail. You can sort by unread, starred, attachments, conversations, dates, and many more criteria. You can even combine different criteria together.
Using these filters makes it extremely easy to quickly find any email you are looking for.
Pro Always keep the inbox clean
Airmail allows users to snooze an email until a defined moment (a few hours later, tomorrow, next weekend, next week, etc.), allowing you to process every email immediately and to always keep the inbox clean.
Pro Supports trackpad gestures
Airmail is able to use trackpad gestures for achieving and deleting mail items.
Pro Swipe actions
Swipe a message to the left to archive, swipe right to place it in a to-do list.
Pro Supports Gmail labels
Boxer has Gmail labels fully supported.
Pro Integrates with other services
There's Dropbox and Box support for cloud storage, LinkedIn and Facebook support for social profiling, Evernote support for notes, etc.
Pro Quick-responses
Click the 'quick' button below when composing a message to put a prewritten snippet of text inside the email. There's a set of ready-made solutions, but you can add your own.
Pro Allows "liking" messages
You can automatically send a quick message of appreciation to the sender by clicking like.
Pro Combined inbox
Boxer uses a combined inbox for all your accounts.
Pro Reminders
Cons
Con Unreliable
There are many issues/bugs with different accounts, including Gmail and iCloud.
Con Serious sync problems
On some IMAP accounts, there are a number of serious sync problems, which otherwise work fine with Apple Mail.
Con Search is buggy and not very powerful
Con Not free
Paid version only.
Con iOS app requires a subscription to enable incoming mail notifications
The iOS app now requires a subscription to enable incoming mail notifications. This makes the iOS app very unattractive and there's little point installing the Mac desktop client for users who want to sync accounts between devices.
Con Copying/moving mails unreliable
Doesn't work most of the time even though the operation is reported as successful. Even has lost emails when moving. Support was not too much use either.
Con Rather expensive
Con Inability to turn off auto-creation of labels
Version 3 does not allow it while version 2 did.
Con UI is a little busy
Con Has the "slow typing" bug
When composing an email, Airmail can respond very slowly to keystrokes. Customer service refuses to acknowledge this problem, responding that it's "not real" - which is a very odd response, to simply refuse to acknowledge the customer's experience.