Using the mail application is not very enjoyable. Viewing individual e-mails is a strangely slow process; click on an item and you see a subject line and header information first, then the iPhone takes another two seconds to load the contents of the e-mail. At first, we thought that the iPhone was reaching out to the mail server to get the contents of the e-mail; that's how slow it is. If you're a heavy BlackBerry e-mail user, you know that any delay greatly slows your progress.
Deleting messages is also a gigantic pain in the butt. You have to either swipe your finger across a message header to bring up a delete button, or you have to enter "edit" mode in the inbox listing and click two additional buttons per message to delete them. We need one-button delete, and we need to be able to delete more than one message at a time. In this spammy-spam world, how can anything less be acceptable?
It gets worse, actually. Deleting these messages just moves them to the trash. If you want to expunge them, you have to delete each one from the trash manually again or wait until the "autodelete" function kicks in. It defaults to "Never," and the most frequent option for emptying the trash is "1 day." Apple needs to give us an option to empty the trash with one click, and we need more frequent options for emptying the trash automatically, too. This is particularly important for keeping IMAP mailboxes in order across multiple connections.
And speaking of automation, users are limited to setting their iPhones to check for e-mail periodically, since push e-mail is not supported aside from Yahoo's mail integration. You can specify manual-only checks, once every five minutes, once every half hour, or once every hour. The more often you have the iPhone check various e-mail servers for mail, the lower your battery life will be, obviously. We chose to have it check once per hour, and manually checked when we needed in between. One thing that we would love would be the ability to set different e-mail accounts to check at different periods of time.
Such account-specific features should also apply to signature support. Like BlackBerrys, the iPhone comes (by default) with its own little "Sent from my iPhone" signature. This can be edited within the iPhone's preferences to say whatever you want. Mine now has my entire Ars e-mail signature, but I kept the iPhone line at the end as a caveat so that anyone reading my e-mails can understand why they might be shorter and more to the point.
The downside to changing the sig to be more your style, however, is that the same sig is used for every single e-mail account on the iPhone. I currently have my standard Ars Technica sig set up on the iPhone, but it ends up being tacked onto every e-mail I send, even from my personal accounts. Mail.app on the Mac allows you to have different signatures for different accounts, and this should be supported on the iPhone as well.
Another half-done oddity about the iPhone in general is that it contains support for Word, Excel, and PDF documents... as read-only. And the only way to get those documents onto your iPhone is to e-mail them to yourself. Reading Word documents is easy, though, and doing so very readable on the iPhone's screen. We found it odd, then, that the iPhone doesn't let you actually edit these documents, since doing so would seem simple and make perfect sense.
A minor, yet helpful feature that we'd like to see in future versions of the iPhone software would be for Growl-like e-mail alerts to pop up on top of other applications when an e-mail comes in. This happens when you receive a new SMS (which we will talk about when we get into the phone stuff later), along with the new SMS sound and a short vibration. Currently, when a new e-mail (or three, or ten) comes in, and you're in another application, it only rings the new mail sound and vibrates. You have no idea how many e-mails you've received, who they're from, or what accounts they are on. A simple, semi-transparent pop-up, like the one provided for SMS messages, displaying even just the subject line and who it's from would be a nice addition to the mail interface, along with a button asking whether you want to view or ignore it.
Spam ahoy
The first two things that anyone who uses e-mail a lot will notice is that the iPhone's mail client contains absolutely no spam filtering whatsoever, and that there is no way to mass-delete e-mails. If you have e-mail accounts that get a lot of spam—even if your mail client on your computer catches most of it, as ours do—you are going to get every single one of those in your iPhone's inbox. And when they come flowing in en masse, you have to delete every single one of them one by one.
Deleting E-mails
Building on our earlier complaints about the lack of a mass-deletion option, there is also no way to mark a handful (or all) e-mails as read in a particular inbox. This can be infuriating upon first sync with the e-mail server when you have hundreds of messages pouring in as "new." More attention to e-mail management features is badly needed on the iPhone.
Exchange support is a joke
The iPhone's mail client does not currently have "real" Exchange support; it can be used with Exchange servers that have IMAP enabled, but it does not support MAPI or RPC or HTTP. Apple says that it supports Exchange, but it supports Exchange in the same way that your Honda Civic supports off-roading. It's technically possible, but you're not going to enjoy it.
The lame Exchange support comes as a huge frustration to throngs of business users who want to use the iPhone as a replacement BlackBerry, push e-mail and all. This is a feature that is rumored to be coming via software update in the future, but for now, Exchange users who want to get on the iPhone are stuck with IMAP, which is workable only if you are not also using the standard MAPI client through Outlook. If you are, your inbox will quickly be out of sync because of the way IMAP and MAPI handle deleted e-mails, along with other reasons. We can't stress this enough: mixing IMAP and MAPI will just leave you sad. Messages you delete using the iPhone's IMAP connection will not be removed from Exchange, even if you empty the trash and sync again.
In sum, Mail is a bunt, but the batter reaches first
We have a lot of complaints about the mail app on the iPhone as we feel that it was ignored, perhaps to the benefit of Safari or the touchscreen implementation itself. Yet, don't get us wrong: the e-mail client is decent, it doesn't crash, and you can send and receive POP and IMAP e-mail easily. It's not going to blow you away though, and it comes nowhere near the BlackBerry e-mail experience, where the BlackBerry and your primary inbox are wedded more or less flawlessly.
