Email clients & productivity
Loud on notifications, nearly silent on price.
What people complain about
| Complaint | Share |
|---|---|
| Reliability — crashes, freezes, “doesn’t work” | 18.5% |
| Missing capability | 10.0% |
| Notifications | 9.3% |
| Slowness | 7.1% |
| Update made it worse | 6.9% |
| Ads & upsell pressure | 5.9% |
| Integration failures | 5.2% |
| Capability removed | 3.9% |
| Complexity & onboarding | 3.2% |
In their words
“Can't add any additional emails addresses... Could not log in any email on the older phone and it was working some time ago. Again they screwed it up!”
Email - Fast & Secure Mail · 1★ · 100 votes
“Latest Update Ruined It! I have used this app for several years and it's been great, but the latest update has broken so many things I don't even know where to start, very slow, gets frozen, doesn't open done emails, new look is awful, etc. I have switched back to my old Gmail app until I can find a new one to use. I'm very sad because this one has always been so amazing.”
Email Blue Mail - Calendar · 2★ · 98 votes
“For a good while this seemed to be the best email client (and I still maintain it's got lots of great, customizable features) but in recent weeks most emails don't load to the inbox without refreshing. Even when I get a notification the message isn't there until I refresh. I alerted tech support, waited for a couple of updates and I even have a new phone now. No improvement there, so unfortunately it's time to search for yet another better app.”
Email - Fast & Secure Mail · 3★ · 93 votes
“Update 1/27/25--Reindexing after deleting mail is very slow. There's no way to turn off the prompt to convert to smart inboxes, nor to turn off threading. History display in threaded messages is horrible. After using it for years I've finally deleted the app, primarily because of the threading issue. In simple language - what the developers prefer in email shouldn't take precedence over what customers want. A simple toggle to turn off threading would have kept this user.”
Spark Mail: AI Email, Calendar · 2★ · 76 votes
Payer pressure is 0.03. The reviewers are staff, drivers, tenants or parents using software their employer or landlord bought. Their complaints are real and commercially inert: they cannot switch, cannot cancel and cannot be sold to. See the payer gate.
What this study cannot tell you
- About 41% of substantive reviews are not matched by the taxonomy, so every percentage here is a floor, not a true rate. The miss rate is roughly uniform across niches, so comparisons between them still hold.
- App-store reviews over-represent the daily user. Buyers complain on G2, Capterra and in churn calls, and those sources are not represented.
- No recency weighting: a complaint from 2021 counts the same as one from last week, so some cited failures may already be fixed.
- Coverage is uneven between stores; where an app is iOS-only in practice its share is computed from Apple data alone.