‘Fully Secure’ MailWise Email App for Android Unclutters Your Inbox

The mobile email space is cluttered with apps that promise to help you cut through your mountains of mail. Can MailWise, a free new Android smartphone app from an Israeli company called Syntomo, deliver you from the clutches of clutter?

Sort of.

The app aims to streamline messages by stripping out “excessive formatting” and email signatures, and turning off images (though you can easily change that), among other things. It automatically groups updates and notifications from your social networks. The app lets you check multiple email accounts at once, including Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, Yahoo and Hotmail.

Like most email programs today, MailWise groups multiple messages in one thread into a conversation and shows you the number of messages in that thread. It has a nice search feature that lets you search a keyword by all fields, as well as confine the search to the To, From, Subject and Body fields.

Beyond that, MailWise is fairly standard. For example, like many other apps I’ve tried, you can swipe on a message to reveal icons for deleting, archiving, labeling and adding a star.

One thing worth mentioning: The developer claims that MailWise is “fully secure,” in that it is a “pure client side app” that stores all your data locally on your device and not on its own servers. I appreciate that, but in most cases, your messages are stored on other servers — Google’s, for instance, so it’s a stretch to say that MailWise makes your email “fully secure.”

As Android email apps go, I like MailWise. The interface is intuitive and clean, and the app is pleasant to use. But I wish you could install it on Android tablets.

Since it’s free, MailWise is worth a look if you’re unhappy with your current Android email client. Just don’t expect it to miraculously cure your inbox of clutter — I’m not sure anything, short of ditching email entirely, could accomplish that.