When it comes down to email, my choice is simple: Gmail. I use Gmail for my work email addresses (everything runs smoothly on Google Apps), and I have a dozen of personal accounts I’ve used in these past years to keep my identity well conceived on the internet. I know you do that, too. Here’s a good tip: create a Gmail account just for your signups (Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla, etc) and forget about your main inbox getting overloaded. It saved my life.

Anyway, while I use the Gmail web interface on the desktop, I’m forced to stick with Mail.app on the iPhone and iPad: the app works fine (could be a lot better though), but the main reason why I don’t use and haven’t even tried other clients is because there are no other clients on iOS. I don’t know if this is about high development costs (maybe) or some restrictions imposed by Apple (likely), still we’re not getting the possibility of installing 3r party mail clients like on our Macs and PCs. That sucks.

There are some Gmail-specific applications in the App Store: Mailroom is one of them, and I love it. It’s like a mobile version of Mailplane, a Cocoa wrapper for multiple Gmail accounts. I use it on a daily basis, but it’s not (and can’t be) my default client. I’ve recently stumbled upon this new app called “Humail” which aims at becoming your new “personal” and “emotional” email client. I gave it a try, and here’s what’s behind the marketing slogans of Humail.

Basically, it’s an email client focused on letting you easily recognize messages from your trusted contacts. It lets you check on incoming emails with a rather innovative and refreshing interface, but it’s not meant for power users who have to deal with hundreds of messages every day. Instead, Humail could be a nice and interesting alternative for anyone who uses email to stay in touch with friends and family, casual users who get a couple of new messages in the morning and that’s it. You can enter as many accounts as you wish (just like Apple’s mail software, Humail supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL and any other IMAP or POP server), but the app is not really stable and optimized to be running with dozens of accounts under the hood. An update to increase stability and performances should be coming out really soon.

In the main screen you can compose a new message, refresh, open the settings and fire up the contact list. The app revolves around the concept of different “envelopes” assigned to your contacts to easily spot messages coming from a certain person. You can open a single account view (the app always take some time to open my work email, maybe because of all the messages and labels inside it) or tap on the “All news” tab to get an overview of all the messages from all your accounts. In the settings, you can set a refresh time for contacts, choose the default envelopes, decide how many recent messages should the app display in each account.

The actual inbox looks like an email version of Coverflow. There’s this group of envelopes coming to the front which you can scroll to a) get a quick preview of the message and b) easily skim through your inbox to see what’s new. You can filter messages with a button in the toolbar, open an envelope with a single tap on it or bookmark, delete and move with some other buttons placed in a persistent action menu on top of each envelope. It’s quite intuitive and good looking, but I have no practical use for this interface. Maybe it’ll make some of my friends go “Wow”, but I want quickness and clarity from my email client. I just want my Priority Inbox and a simple list of incoming messages. I don’t need the eye candy in email.

So, Humail. An interesting approach to email that won’t make power users’ jaws drop, but that can surely appeal those of you who don’t need to stay professional all the time, and just want to check on emails because a good friend might have sent something. Humail is certainly promising and I’m looking forward to testing future versions (the app doesn’t even support the Retina Display now, and it crashes every once in a while), but as it stands now Humail is an interesting experiment. Worth a look if you don’t need much from your email, or if you’re a geek always looking for the next big thing. $2.99 in the App Store.