I’ve been looking at ways to make the iPhone’s email program work better for me, and would like to pass on some tips:
Only want to receive new emails when it’s convenient for you?
I don’t like my phone to make a noise telling me there’s new mail, only to find that it’s spam. Also, I think it’s not very good to have a phone pinging away when I’m with a client: there’s always the temptation to be rude and look at the phone (see this earlier blog on the subject of “phubbing”). If you agree with me, then you can change your settings so that you only receive email when you want it:
- Go to Settings
- Mail, Contacts, Calendars
- Fetch New Data
- Tap on each email account in turn and tap on “Manual”
- Scroll down to the heading “Fetch” and tap against “manually”
Now, when you open your email app and tap on the inbox (or “All Inboxes”), your iphone will fetch your email for you. It will stay calm and quiet when you are doing other things.
Want to see more inbox items per screen?
When you go to your email inbox(es), the app shows who a message is from, the subject, and two lines of the body of the email. This means that you can only see a few messages per screen. You can see more if you change the setting so that only the sender and subject are displayed:
- Go to Settings
- Mail, Contacts, Calendars
- Scroll down to the “Mail” section and tap on “Preview”
- Tap against “none”
Jump straight to “Drafts”
If you tend to write emails a bit at a time, such as when you’ve got a few tube stops to travel, you will probably often wish to go to email drafts. This is easily achieved with a long press on the icon for creating a new email. Instead of starting to create a new email, a long press takes you straight to Drafts.
Reply to a specific part of an email
If you wish to send an email reply, but are only addressing one part of the incoming email, it is easy to quote just that part in your reply:
- Highlight the text you wish to quote in your reply
- Press the “reply” button in the usual way
You will see that only the quoted part of the original email is included below your reply.
Change your email signature
If you would like a more personalised signature at the bottom of your emails than “Sent from my iPhone”, here is how it is done:
- Go to Settings
- Mail, Contacts, Calendars
- Scroll down and tap on “Signatures”
- Choose whether to use one signature for all your email accounts or vary it by account
- Replace the default text with your own signature(s)
When I first started using an iPhone, I was quick to replace the original email signature as I didn’t want to give Apple free advertising on the bottom of my emails. I later re-instated the default as it does indicate that the email came from a smartphone and might, therefore, be expected to be shorter than my normal longer, more considered message, would have been.
Always send a BCC to yourself
A “BCC” is a “blind carbon copy”. This means sending a copy (“carbon copy”) without the message’s recipient knowing you are doing it (“blind”). This is useful if your email account is a “POP” account as you wouldn’t otherwise have a copy of the message you sent from your iPhone in any other place (eg the email program on your main computer). It’s then easy enough to move that copy from the inbox of your “main” computer to the “sent” folder just as if you had sent it from there in the first place. To do this:
- Go to Settings
- Mail, Contacts, Calendars
- Scroll down and slide the switch to the right that is next to “Always Bcc Myself”
