Friday 8 July 2016

Best Android Email Client

These days many people want to connect their personal phone to their work email. There are many great reasons to do this, not having to carry 2 cell phones if your work provides you one, being able to stay on top of your email while away from your desk, and enhanced productivity.

There is a risk in doing this that people accept when they don't have to. Most companies will remote wipe any devices connected to an email account when a staff member leaves, voluntarily or otherwise.  This is standard business practice, ensuring company data doesn't walk away with the employee.

But what about all your personal data and apps on the phone? Well in many cases it gets wiped in the process. I saw one coworker lose all her photos because they remote wiped her device and she hadn't been backing them up to the cloud.

So do we stop connecting our devices to the office? Seems pretty harsh. There is a better way.

Enter Nine. This is a fantastic email client, probably better than what came with your phone and definitely better than Outlook for Android. (Sorry Microsoft, you need to do better.)

Beyond a great user interface Nine protects your personal data from remote wipes. If your administrator sends a wipe command only your company email, contacts, and calendar are removed. All your other data remains safe.

It doesn't matter what Mobile Device Management (MDM) software they use, Nine by default only allows the server to be an administrator over the company data, nothing else. The server will believe it has full control and thus let you join, but in reality your personal data and apps are completely safe.

Hands-down this one feature makes it worth using, but there are a lot of other reasons to use Nine.

Unlike many clients, Nine will allow you to sync all the folders and sub-folders you wish, keeping them as easy to navigate as they are in Outlook.

Nine uses a rich text editor, meaning you can compose HTML emails as easily as you do from your computer.

Security - Nine secures your email and attachments, supporting SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption.  Want to keep the kids out of your work email but still let them play Angry Birds? No problem, Nine can require a pass code to open. The code can be different from your device pass code.

Favorite folder - Nine allows you to tag your most commonly used emails and senders to a Favorites folder regardless of where you actually store them. This gives you quick and easy access to the emails you need the most.

VIP's - Nine lets you tag senders or domains as VIP's, determining how and when you want to be notified if they have emailed you. You can receive notification of email from a VIP even if your phone is on silent.

Custom calendar, notes, and tasks - Instead of trying to present these inside Nine the app syncs them to your phone's default calendar, notes, and tasks apps, letting you have choice on how you interact with them.

Nine should also help save you data. The app only downloads the first part of the message, allowing you to choose when to download the whole email. By default it doesn't download images automatically. (You can change this at any time) This helps conserve your data, and protects you from prying eyes who use email tracking technology like MailTrack. You can read the email, not view the images, and MailTrack will not know you've opened the message.

Nine can handle multiple accounts, so if you want to be able to read your work email as well as your hotmail account, outlook.com, or office 365 account all in one app this is something to consider.

Nine won't work with your personal gmail account due to changes in how Google supports activesync, however it will work with a business gmail account, offering you the same level of protection.

There are more features and reasons to consider using Nine. It comes with a 2 week free trial, and I would encourage anyone who is connected or is considering connecting their personal cellphone to a company mail server to give it a try. After all, why risk letting your work wipe your data, it's yours after all.

Happy surfing!

-The Home Geek

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