After reading a very well written and glowing review of Dispatch on The Sweet Setup, I decided to download the app and give it a try. I was very excited about many of the features extolled by The Sweet Setup.

support for most IMAP based email clients (Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, etc.)
a unified inbox for multiple accounts
fluid, intuitive gestures for easy deleting, archiving, and marking email as spam
advanced settings for custom salutations, signatures, and form responses
powerful tools for turning important emails into to-do items, reference material, and calendar events

The app also comes with support for TextExpander snippets—which is awesome—and other great features. I was sold right away.

I had been using Mailbox for more than a year now, and it was very good, but I had a few minor issues with it—mostly the lack of support for Yahoo. It also lacked some of the power features that Dispatch was promising, like snippets, turning emails into reminders, sending to Evernote or Fantastical, etc.

So, I downloaded Dispatch and set up my 7 (yes, 7) IMAP email accounts, and started playing around with the app. At first, everything seemed great. But, things turned south pretty quickly. When I tried to send an email, I got an error message. I tried over and over again, but ended up with the same result. Also, the app crashed pretty regularly. Mostly when I was archiving emails and moving onto the next one pretty quickly. Within the first day, I deleted and reinstalled the app, but ended up with the same results. Next, I contacted the app's support email through the app, which default's to Apple's Mail.app, as per iOS rules (kind of ironic). Anyway, I waited a few days before I got a very basic response from the developer telling me that I should try to uninstall and reinstall the app. I explained that I already did that, and that all the other functions seemed to be working okay, aside from crashing. That was it. That was the last response I received. It's been about 12 days since that first response and I'ver heard nothing since. I responded with all the pertinent details (phone model, iOS version, etc.), but never heard back again. I've since contacted the author of the review on The Sweet Setup on Twitter—who was very nice, by the way—and he tells me it's only a single developer. That's great, but that doesn't solve my problem. I paid $4.99 for an app that doesn't work for me. It won't let me send emails. Let me say that again—it's kind of a critical function for an email app. I can't send emails! Oh, and it crashed on me quite a bit. Now, I'm willing to accept that there's a chance that I'm an edge case and most users aren't having the same problems as me. But, that's why I sent in my details. Users with an iPhone 5S, running iOS 7.1, with 7 IMAP accounts running on the app can't be that out of the ordinary. Maybe I'm wrong.

In the end, I've now deleted the app. I shouldn't have waited as long as I did, but the review was just so damned good, that I really wanted the app to work for me. Now, I'm back to Mailbox, which is fine by me. I'll miss the support for TextExpander snippets (not enough apps have snippet support), and I'll miss being able to send emails directly to several different "to do" apps. The good news is that Mailbox announced today that they'll be releasing Android and Mac apps, and a new feature called Auto-swipe, that tries to predicts which emails you will archive or snooze.

I'm back to Mailbox, and I'll let you know how I like using the new apps and Auto-swipe feature.