Back in September, iOS and macOS email app Newton were shut down, much to the disappointment of Newton Mail enthusiasts. At the time, Newton parent company CloudMagic said that though the company tried various business models, it wasn't able to figure out how to maintain profitability and growth over the long term.
A couple of months later, Essential, a smartphone company owned by Android co-creator Andy Rubin, purchased CloudMagic and the Newton app. At the time, it wasn't known what Essential planned to do with the Newton app.
The company's plan became clear this week when a new version of the Newton email app showed up in the App Store and the Mac App Store, bringing it back to life. The Newton apps were never actually pulled, but they hadn't been updated for months and were becoming unusable due to bugs and crashes.
Since December, CloudMagic and Essential have been working to bring Newton Mail back to life, and there are interface improvements and new features like deleting a single email in a thread, resizing the Mac compose window, adding emails to OmniFocus, and other enhancements to the compose window on Mac.
Newton Mail has also had its pricing restructured. At the time it was shut down, CloudMagic was charging $100 per year upfront for Newton, which may be a major reason why it ultimately was an unsustainable business model. It's difficult to get people to pay $100 for an email app.
Newton Mail is now priced at $49.99 per year, which is still expensive, but more reasonable than $100. There's also a 14 day free trial so you can give it a go before downloading.
The app has a simple, clean interface and features like read receipts, send later, inbox filtering for newsletters and other junk mail, snooze, app integration, undo send, recap for notifying you about emails waiting for a reply, one-click unsubscribe, and push notifications, all features that many users like.
Of course, with any third-party email app, it's always worth investigating privacy policies to see what companies are doing with your data. Newton says it may share aggregated or de-identified information with third parties and works with third-party social platforms like Facebook to serve targeted ads unless you opt out, which is something to be aware of.
MacRumors videographer Dan is a big fan of Newton Mail and it's his go-to email app, so make sure to watch the video above to see Newton Mail in action. And if you're looking for other email app alternatives, we recently rounded up some of the best iOS email apps in the App Store.
Top Rated Comments
Having gone from:
"All the information we collect from you is only used to give you the best possible experience using Newton. We don’t run ads inside the product or sell data to make money. We’ve built a good product and charge our users a subscription to run the business."
[Old Privacy Policy ('https://web.archive.org/web/20180808061601/https://newtonhq.com/k/privacypolicy')]
to
"We may work with third-party social platforms, such as Facebook, to serve ads to you as part of a customized campaign, unless you notify us that you prefer not to have information about you used in this way by sending an email to notices@newtonhq.com indicating the email address you wish to have removed from customized ad campaigns.
[Current Privacy Policy ('https://newtonhq.com/k/privacypolicy')]
..is absurd for a product that charges any fees.
So an app shuts down more than 4 months ago and I can login again with my old credential? Does that mean my other old data is also intact?
If old data is still intact, it shows total disregard for user privacy. I am not taking any risk.