I didn't find any alternative yet. There are a lot of cloud based alternatives, but that's a privacy nightmare. eM Client looks promising, just came out of beta and works without a MITM cloud service.

I took it to mean the native Mail app on the iPhone. Not their email service.

I personally can’t imagine not using the native email app. It’s quite nice.

> I took it to mean the native Mail app on the iPhone. Not their email service.

That may be what the person you replied to is referring to as well. It’s been a trend for a while that new email apps (either on Desktop or phone) use their own server in the middle with access to your credentials to do stuff like syncing and sending emails on a schedule.

Yes since version 1.0, it is quite good. I hope we can turn off these "AI" functionalities. I like my email chronology. I have my own filters to move emails etc... don't need or want an "AI" to do that for me.