E-mail improvements in iOS 5

I suspect that if you ask lawyers what app they use the most on an iPhone or iPad, the answer would be Mail.  I suspect many non-lawyers would say the same thing.  We get and send tons of e-mail messages a day, and anything that makes it easier to handle those messages is appreciated.  The new iPhone and iPad operating system, iOS 5, became available last week.  The upgrade can take several hours and some features (like iCloud) can be confusing at first.  Nevertheless, there are so many new features in this free upgrade that I think that virtually all iPhone and iPad owners should make the jump.  Here are the improvements to the way that the iPhone and iPad handle e-mail in iOS 5 that I have found to be very helpful, and which many will find to be a good reason to upgrade:

1. New e-mail(s) on the Lock Screen.  I love that when I get a new e-mail and my iPhone is in sleep mode, I can now see the sender, subject, and the first line of the message.  That is enough information for me to decide whether this is an e-mail that I need to pay attention to or is one that can wait.  If you do want to view the e-mai right away, just wipe to unlock your screen and you are taken right to that e-mail.  This is useful for seeing an important, new e-mail as soon as it shows up.  It is also useful if your iPhone has been in your pocket for a while and you haven't been paying much attention to it and several e-mails have come in.  You might be in another meeting and have a short break, and you can now just press the home button or the sleep/wake button and then glance at the screen of the iPhone to see new e-mails.  To turn on this feature, go to Settings -> Notifications -> Mail (which might be listed either under "In Notification Center" or "Not in Notification Center" depending upon your current setup) and then turn on "View in Lock Screen." 
2. New e-mail notifications.  If you are doing something else on your iPhone or iPad and a new e-mail arrives, you can now receive notification of the sender and the subject line of the message.  Notifications can come in two formats, a banner at the very top of the screen or an alert in the middle of the screen.  I don't like the alert choice because then you get a blue box in the middle of the screen and you need to either tap "dismiss" or "read" to make it go away.  But the banner style of notification is fantastic.  Just glance at the banner at the top of the screen to see what e-mail came in.  If it is something that matters to you, just tap the banner to jump to the Mail app and see it, but if not, just ignore the banner and it will go away in a few seconds.
3. Rich text formatting.   Before iOS 5, messages that you composed in the Mail app were always plain text.  Now, if you want to add some simple rich text formatting — bold, underline and italics — you can do so.  Just write the word(s), then select the word(s) and you will see a pop-up menu.  (To select a word, hold your finger on it until the magnifying glass shows up, then let go and tap on the word "Select" in the pop-up menu.)  Next tap the arrow at the end of the pop-up menu and you will see more options, one of which is a button labeled BIU which lets you apply bold, italics or underline.  A small gripe:  on the iPhone, I understand the need for first tapping the arrow (you can only fit so many menu options on the screen at once) but on the iPad I wish that Apple would get rid of the arrow and just have a larger pop-up menu since there is ample space for it. 
4. Dictation.  This is a feature of Siri, which currently only exists on the iPhone 4S, but it is a wonderful new feature of iOS 5.  To write an e-mail, just tap on the microphone button that is next to the space key and dictate.  After a second or so, the text that you just dictated shows up in your e-mail without you having to type anything at all.  I've been jealous of this feature on Android phones for a while now and I love using it on an iPhone.  Hopefully it will come to the iPad at some pont, although I wonder if Apple will hold this one back until the iPad 3.
5. Split keyboard on the iPad.  The iPad may not support Siri yet, but the split keyboard is another new way to compose a message on the iPad.  When you see the full keyboard appear on your screen, put your finger on the bottom right key and then swipe up.  This makes the keyboard smaller and splits it in two.  You can then hold the iPad in two hands and use your thumbs to type.  It takes some time to get used to this method of typing, but it sometimes feels faster to type this way.  By the way, you can use the split keyboard in other apps too, but Mail is where you are likely to use it the most.  By the way, you can also press and hold on that button to see a pop-up menu that gives you the option to undock the keyboard.  This lets you move the full keyboard up and down the screen.  I can't yet think of why this is useful, but perhaps you'll find it to be a fun party trick.
6. Shortcuts.  Another improvement to composing e-mails (and this one works on both the old and new iPhones and the iPad) is the addition of shortcuts.  You can have letters automatically replaced with other text.  For example, on my iPhone I often have the need to type "iPhone J.D." but it is a pain to do so with all of the capital letters and periods.  Now I can just type ijd and my iPhone automatically changes it to iPhone J.D.  Another useful one that is included by default is that you type omw and the iPhone or iPad changes it to On my way!  To add more, simply go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard and then scroll down to the bottom to see the Shortcuts.  To delete a shortcut, tap the "Edit" button at the top right of the Keyboard screen.
7. Search the body of e-mails.  If you scroll up to the top of your e-mails, there is a place where you can search your Inbox (or whatever current Mail folder you are in).  In the past you could only search the "From" "To" or "Subject" fields, but now if you tap the new "All" selection the iPhone will look for your search term in all fields, including the body of an e-mail message.  This is a great way to track down an old message, and it is very fast.
8. PDF viewing on an iPad.  If someone sends you an e-mail with a PDF attached and you tap on the PDF to view it on the iPad, you can now see a tiny preview of each of the pages on the right side of the screen.  This makes it easy to see how many pages are on the PDF, but better yet, you can tap any page preview to jump directly to that page, saving you the hassle of scrolling up or down a long document.  You can even slide your finger up or down the page previews to quickly look at each page.  Tap in the middle of the screen to make all menus, including those previews, disappear.  In addition to seeing this new feature, it also seems to me that PDF viewing is much faster in iOS 5, although I haven't done a test to confirm this.
9. Swap a person between "to" and "cc" and "bcc" fields.  Have you ever started typing a message to Person A with Person B as a "cc" and then you realize that Person B should really be in the "to" field?  In the past you had to delete Person B from the "cc" field and then manually add him to the "to" field.  In iOS 5, just drag the bubble around the person's name to put him in the right field.  This is especially useful when you do a "Reply All" because sometimes Person A sends a message, Person B responds, then you want to reply as well but you are really directing your reply at Person A, not Person B.
10. Switch between apps on the iPad 2 using four fingers.  If you want to quickly change from the Mail app to another app, just place four fingers on the screen and swipe to the left or right to switch between apps, sort of like Alt-Tab on a PC or Command-Tab on a Mac.  Technically this feature is not unique to the Mail app and works to switch between any apps on the iPad 2, but because I use the Mail app so much on my iPad, this is where this feature is most useful.  Over the last few days I have been using this feature a lot to switch between Mail and GoodReader, and it is so much faster with this shortcut.  Also useful:  put four fingers on the screen and swipe up to bring up a menu at the bottom with recently used apps, then tap the app to switch to it.  Another useful tip:  put those four fingers on the screen and then pinch in to hide the current app and see your Home Screen.
11. Message flags.  Mail now shows you when a message is flagged (although it only shows red flags, not any other color).  If you want to flag a message yourself, tap the blue "Mark" word in the subject and date area of a message, which brings up a menu asking if you want to flag the message or mark it as unread.  Unfortunately, this means that you now need to tap twice to mark a message as unread; before iOS 5 this only required one tap.  But it is very useful to now have the option to create and view flags.
12. Definitions.  See a word in an e-mail that you don't understand?  Just select the word and then choose "Define" in the pop-up menu.  This brings up a nicely-designed screen with a definition, pronunciation, usage, and the other information that you would find in a nice dictionary.  This one works in other apps, too.
13. Mark several messages at once.  You can now quickly select a bunch of messages to mark as read or unread or to add or remove a flag.  Just tap the "Edit" button at the top right of your list of messages.  Circles appear on the left side of your messages.  Tap on one or more messages and then you will see that you have the option to delete them all, move them all, or mark them all — and mark includes both read/unread and flag options.
14. View unread messages.  In iOS 5, if you swipe down from the top of any screen you will see the new Notification Center.  If you want, you can have 1, 5 or 10 most recent unread e-mails listed there.  To turn on this feature, go to Settings -> Notifications -> Mail (which might be listed either under "In Notification Center" or "Not in Notification Center" depending upon your current setup) and then tap the "Show" button.
15. See a message list in portrait mode on the iPad.  If you are reading an e-mail with your iPad turned to the portrait mode, you don't see a list of messages.  But now you can swipe one finger from the left side of the screen towards the middle to see a list of all of your e-mails, without having to rotate your iPad back to the landscape mode.
16. Manage mailboxes.  iOS 5 gives you the ability to create new folder within an Exchange or IMAP mailbox, change the name of a mail folder, or delete a mail folder.
17. Change indent levels for quotes.  Once you select some text, press the right arrow in the pop-up menu to see an option to increase or decrease the indent levels for the quotes of prior messages.  To be honest, this is a feature that I don't expect to use very often, but I suppose it is nice to have this power.  If you want to always remove the indentations when you reply or forward an e-mail, you can now turn this off by going to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Increase Quote Level.
18. Secure signing and encryption of e-mails.  If you want to sign your e-mails using a public key so that other folks know it really came from you, or if you want to encrypt messages, iOS 5 now supports S/MIME.  Justin Rummel wrote a good overview of what this means and why you might want to use it in this post.
19. UPDATE for Gruber and Koz:  Disable the unread e-mail badge.  John Gruber of Daring Fireball linked to this post and added:  "My pal Koz says Richardson missed the number-one new feature in Mail — the ability to turn off the unread message count icon badge. (Settings: Notifications: Mail: Badge App Icon.)"  I must admit that I hadn't thought of this as an e-mail improvement; why would you NOT want the Mail icon to tell you how many unread message you have?  Seeing that number increase is a helpful way to see how many new messages you have to read.  Having said that, Gruber and Michael Koziarski are correct to note that this is a new Mail-related feature, so I should have mentioned it.  And now I have.

These are some pretty major improvements to one of the most important apps on the iPhone and iPad.

Comments

[Rholliday]

I'm assuming that Exchange flags are properly displayed, and not just flags created on the iPhone? If so, that's very, very cool.

[Jeff replies: Yes. Exchange flags are properly displayed.]

[Jason]

Actually, it always took two taps to mark messages as unread in previous versions of Mail. First you had to tap "more", then "mark as unread" would appear. Find an older iPhone or iPod that hasn't been updated to iOS 5 and see for yourself.

[Fabrizio Rinaldi]

Gmail is also better supported. i.e. the folder All Messages has a new icon, and the Starred folder correctly contains the flagged items. Just little things by the way. Thanks for the post!

[grover]

Re 4 - Get Dragon Dictation, from the same people who made Siri. It's not as full featured, but does a fairly respectable job of speech to text, and can copy to email, text, etc.

[Tom]

Biggest new feature for me was the ability to move and delete emails while offline. As a London commuter who spends lots of time on the tube I can now get started on email triage before getting into the office.

Thanks for the rest of the list, didn't know about the flags syncing back to Exchange.

[Kevin Teljeur]

These are nice features to be sure, but the updated Mail app is missing two features which are big, unfathomable omissions and give users of other platforms a good reason to laugh at email use on iOS.

1. Per-account signatures. How, after all these years, is it still not possible.

2. Re-ordering of email accounts. Same again. I don't get it.

These aren't difficult things to implement for the iOS team, but painful omissions for end users. My hope is that with OTA updates that they'll push these features up now that they can continuously update the OS at will... But still.

Kevin

[Owen Billcliffe]

The ability to undock the keyboard is most useful in portrait mode on the iPad. In portrait mode the split keyboard by default sits at the bottom of the screen. It's too hard to hold the iPad at the bottom of the screen AND type with your thumbs - the most stable position is about a quarter to two thirds of the way up the screen. Then you can almost rest the iPad on your fingertips while you type with thumbs.

[Influous]

Also, standard IMAP accounts are clearly better supported. Mine now has six folders at the top level (Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Trash, Archive, Junk Mail) each with a dedicated icon.

This required no configuration other than providing the server details and is a big improvement on iOS 4, where by default some of the folders were indented and sending a message created an extra "Sent Items" folder - fixed by various changes in the Advanced settings.

[Pablo Carlier]

I actually always disable all email notifications and unread count indicators. I find they make a perfect source of distraction and disruption of my workflow. I believe email should not be a means for urgent communication, therefore it is not worth being disrupted by these alerts. Part of my time management and work style, check your mail only a certain number of times a day and focus on your current task. For people who receive 100+ emails a day as I do it is almost a must, and this is a very welcome update.

[LunaticSX]

#7, "Search the body of e-mails" already existed in iOS before iOS 5.

Also prior to iOS 5 the state of the "Details" info view containing the "Mark as Unread" control was persistent between viewing of different emails once it was togged on or off. So once you turned the "Details" info on then the "Mark as Unread" control would always be just a single tap away.

[Greg]

All the other features are great improvements too, but the reason turning off the unread message badge is important is because some of us don't manage our email that way. For better or worse, my inboxes are full of "unread" messages for one reason or another, usually not actually unread but left that way for future reference, a sort of quick and dirty tagging. Turning off that meaningless number on my iPhone is a nice touch and admission that apparently it's not just me who does this. ;-)

[Enkerli]

@Jason: Actually, if you keep “more” active (which I usually did) it only took one tap to mark as unread.

Going through this list, I got most enthusiastic about #15. Unfortunately, the way it works isn’t a huge improvement over iOS4. The list of mailboxes or messages still covers your message and still disappears when you on a message. I often hold my iPad in landscape orientation but checking email is one that I’d often want to do in portrait (say, for one-handed operation). From what I see, that particular feature update won’t help me much.

Thanks to Koz and Gruber for that update, on #19. The badge is quite distracting when you have thousands of unread messages. While Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero™” is a neat concept, it can take a while to implement. Besides, there are other ways to get notifications of new messages (Pushmail, for instance).

[GH]

what I really want is a "Delete All" email button. I hate deleting all emails
individually/conversationally

[The Plaid Cow]

I really wish that #7 was implemented for all account types, but for the best I can tell, it just doesn't work with IMAP accounts. (I would be happy to be proven wrong, but searching for words I know only to be in the message bodies has turned up zero results.

Another thing I believe to be a new feature, is that the number of messages per mailbox that can be stored on the device has been increased. The old limit was 200 messages and now there are options to store up to 500 or 1000 messages.

[Ken]

My biggest annoyance in Mail still exists. In my morning NYC subway commute, I like to go through emails that came in during the night. This brings on a barrage of Microsoftian popup messages about not being able to access the mail server, not being able to access the outgoing mail server, no data connection, etc. When I saw that iOS 5 was going to have better offline mail support, I was really hoping the app would be more intelligent about knowing it was offline, like some great third party apps, but it hasn't changed.

[Rob]

Also, now the multiple mark/delete commands persist while in a search, whereas before you had to act on each message individually.

[Westacular]

@The Plaid Cow: I just did a bit of testing on that, with my IMAP-synced Gmail account.

What it appears to do:

If you're searching based on the "from", "to", or "subject" fields, Mail will start by searching among the messages already stored locally, and at the bottom (if the server supports server-side searching) there will be a "Continue Search on Server..." item.

However, if "all" is selected, Mail does *not* start with a local search; instead, it jumps directly to loading and relying on server-side search results. So, if your IMAP server does not support that search mode, or if it's not available, the search will appear to fail or give no results.

[cf]

I wish there was a way to make the badge, or the notifications panel, show only emails from a particular account (as you can with desktop Mail).

[Arthur Jackson]

What about setting spam rules? Are there any anti-spam features at all?

[Jeff responds: I think that Apple expects you to handle this on your server on your computer. There is nothing in the iPhone mail client that handles spam, nor or there any rules management features.]

[John Nick]

Re: only showing notifications from specified email accounts: I use 3rd-party app "Boxcar." It's been perfect.

[Skidoo]

Filing emails is a pain if one has many folders. Scrolling through hundreds of folders is just not efficient. There is an app called eMailganizer which helps considerably, but Apple ought to come up with a system where you can type the name of the destination mailbox to file.

[Ian Woodland]

what I desperately would like is to filter unread messages! what's the point of being able to mark as unread or flag if you can't then filter to see only those! This and a signature per email account is what i'd like to see