#let.ter

Email is a necessary evil. It is evil because it is distracting. I find myself in the middle of a task and an email arrives which I have to respond to, and then another and then another and very soon I have no recall of what I was originally working on. So, I have time windows. I do email in thirty minute windows two or three times a day. At the end of each window, I quit the email program, I use Apple’s stock Mail app.

However, the need to send email beckons a lot more than the windows I have designated for email. The solution: an app which lets me send email without the need to launch Mail.

On iOS devices, I use Drafts. On both the iPad and the iPhone, Drafts lets me compose an email, in markdown.

Then I hit the action button on the top right hand corner, and get this.

Choose Markdown>Email and it gives me a compose email window with my content neatly turned into rich text. Fill in the recipients name, send, and I am done with the email.

On the Mac, I use Let.ter. It lets me do a similar thing. I write the email in markdown.

I can preview it.

And then I send it along.

Textwell lets me do the same thing from within the program. I write my content. I highlight it. I can send it to a predefined recipient or I can just choose email and it will give me a mail compose window, and I can enter the email addresses of the intended recipients. Click send and I am done. The only downside of Textwell is that it doesn’t do the markdown to rich text conversion. So, if you don’t always write in markdown, Textwell can do the job fine.

I use these apps several times during the day and they are very useful to me. I get the benefit of sending email without the distraction that the category brings with it.

You can buy Textwell Mac version here. $9.99. You can buy Textwell iOS version here. $2.99. You can buy Drafts 4.0 for iOS here. $9.99. You can buy Let.ter app directly from the developers for $3.99.

Image via Let.ter

I’m not sure why, but sometimes when I’m writing an important email, I’ll compose it in a plain text editor first and then copy/paste it into my email app for delivery. According to the folks behind Let.ter, a lot of us end up doing this, and for good reason. It’s because the challenge with writing email in an email app is that you can see new emails coming in. It’s distracting. When you’re mid-sentence and all of a sudden J. Crew’s emailing to let you know the new summer fashions are in, you can’t help but get sidetracked.

  Let.ter is kind of like writing those emails in a separate text editor—where there are no distractions—except you can send it from there as well. Their analogy is that you wouldn’t write letters from your Mailbox, where all your junkmail is, so why do it from your email inbox?

  Let.ter’s a desktop app available for Mac, and is free to try.