iPhone mail: the sequel

Order of need from my point of view

1) Mail Search

2) Distinction between "new" emails and "unopened" emails (BB does this very nicely and I miss it greatly). I share a home email account with my wife and I don’t want to “open” her emails, but when I don’t it is difficult to know that you have new emails without searching all the different accounts

3) ability to set different icons to directly open to different email inboxes (each with its own new/unopened counter) This would speed switching between inboxes and it would allow me to focus on the work inbox during work and personal at other times.

4) Some indication on the locked wallpaper page that a new email has arrived. I dislike having to unlock the phone just to see if the email number has increased. Conversely, it would be cool to have an indication of missed calls or new email without having to light up the screen. I know it’s very BB, but does anyone know what the lights/holes under the glass on the left side of the earpiece? A very small light or such (different for different things maybe) would be great in my opinion.

5) unified inbox, but without some of the above notification enhancements this would still be clumsy. (I’m confused about some of the responses about disliking the unified BB listing. On all my past BBs I had to “hide” the individual email icons and just have the unified one visible. It would have been just as easy to hide the unified and only use the separated individual mailboxes.)

I just began using my Gmail account, because Yahoo! is having identity issues with my iPhone. I was thoroughly p!ssed, but later realized that Gmail will allow me to send and receive my Yahoo! mail within my Gmail account. It'll also allow me to use my Yahoo! address as my "From" address from within Gmail.

In order to view multiple accounts within Gmail; follow these steps from your Gmail account:

1. Click on Settings (upper right corner of your screen)
2. Click on Accounts
3. Click on Add Account/Email Address

Using my Gmail account in this manner on my iPhone allows me to view both my Yahoo! and Gmail correspondence all within the same mail account. This may [temporarily] solve your problem of not having a unified Inbox on your iPhone. Check it out... It's pretty cool!

My suggestion for separating the different acccounts: swipe left and right from the inbox or any folder like you do with photos. Doing it from inside a message moves back and forth between messages (the little arrows are hard to hit). Swiping is much less taxing IMO than tapping.

Maybe someone should also start a MobileMe thread! I wish they had server side rules for filtering emails before reaching the iphone like Exchange and Gmail do. I agree combining email boxes like apple mail (desktop) is SO wonderful and I think it is a nessesity for the iphone. I have to tap four times to switch between email boxes and with 5 email boxes it is a hassle. I'd rather see one inbox and when I click on the message or scroll through them they have a little tag or maybe they color the subject line differently, personally I don't really care where the email comes from as long as I can reply and it knows which mailbox that message was from so it can put the correct (From) header.

I'd love to be able to customize email notification on a per-account basis. Right now, I'm having to turn off automatic checking on a couple of my accounts so that I can know when I get a new email in my most important account. That's annoying. I can pick a different ringtone for every person who calls me, but I can't set different email notification? Boo.

There is a serious problem with the current iPhone Mail App implementation. If you send mail from a MobileMe account, using your alias, the sender (and reply-to) addresses that the recipient sees are those of your *root* MobileMe account. Not only does this defeat the purpose of offering alias names, but it reveals your root account name to spammers.

Surely Apple did not intend this. It is a very unfortunate oversight, and one that needs an urgent fix.

I see nothing in the original complaints or in the new requested features that would make it into a new version of mail. Remember, Apple is most proud of the features that they leave out.

One exception: Search. That's a no-brainer and I am sure it will be in soon enough. That's the only reason I sometimes use the Gmail web interface on the iphone - it's actually very good, and tailored specifically to the iPhone, it looks like a native app. And it has search ;)

Combining mailboxes? That feature is pretty advanced in OS X mail, and to my knowledge OS X Mail is the only email client that does this. It took me years until I even noticed this feature, then I decided to never use it because I have separate accounts for separate things (work, private), and mixing them doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

All I want is landscape mode. Makes writing 200% faster. I can't understand why the application that is used for most text input can't have it. (Landscape SMS would be nice too.)

I'm stiull holding out for cut, copy and paste...

Landscape view for reading and composing emails. Seems so simple, I can't imagine why Apple hasn't included it from the beginning.