How to Receive Unique Alerts for VIP Emails on iPhone and iPad

[MacRumors]

If you use the VIP feature in the iOS Mail app then you'll already know how they can help you keep track of important messages from your key contacts amid the daily torrent of incoming emails.

Keeping on top of VIP emails can be made even easier by ensuring you receive a specific sound or vibration alert whenever one comes through on your iPhone or iPad. That way you'll know if a new message justifies your immediate attention before you've even looked at your iOS device. Here's how to set them up.

1. Launch the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap Mail in the list.
   
   
   
   Tap Notifications.
3. Tap VIP.
4. Tap Sounds.
   
   
   
   Choose a unique sound from the list or tap Vibration to select a special vibration. The default sound alert is Ding (Classic), so be sure to choose something different.

With that done, the next time you receive an email from one of your VIPs, you'll get the unique notification alert and immediately know it's an important message.

Article Link: How to Receive Unique Alerts for VIP Emails on iPhone and iPad

 

[johnnyturbouk]

This is all very well but I tend to have my phone on silent a lot, as I work with patients. What would be an elegant and really useful feature would be if apple adopted a filter system like sanebox. Using smart machine learning to recognise the difference btwn random crap from group-on and amazon reporting offers, to say receipts. I currently have my gmail as my professional email account, me.com for family and yahoo for signing up with companies that I know willl then spam my email.

 

[jent]

This is all very well but I tend to have my phone on silent a lot, as I work with patients. What would be an elegant and really useful feature would be if apple adopted a filter system like sanebox. Using smart machine learning to recognise the difference btwn random crap from group-on and amazon reporting offers, to say receipts. I currently have my gmail as my professional email account, me.com for family and yahoo for signing up with companies that I know willl then spam my email.

You can also set a custom vibration, though, which is very useful for when the phone is on silent.

 

[chino-rican]

This assumes the following is activated: Settings > Passwords & Accounts > Fetch New Data > Push > ON; Change the desired email account to Fetch.

Otherwise, you will only get the alert if you open the Mail app and download new emails.

 

[ignatius345]

This is all very well but I tend to have my phone on silent a lot, as I work with patients. What would be an elegant and really useful feature would be if apple adopted a filter system like sanebox. Using smart machine learning to recognise the difference btwn random crap from group-on and amazon reporting offers, to say receipts. I currently have my gmail as my professional email account, me.com for family and yahoo for signing up with companies that I know willl then spam my email.

Not sure I understand -- seems like you already have your email categorized by account. Wouldn't turning off alerts on your Yahoo account insure you won't get alerts for mailing lists and whatnot?

After spending way too much time over the years tuning Gmail filters, using plus-addressing and all this other garbage I finally did more or less what you're doing and partitioned everything by account: Gmail for personal and professional stuff, and an iCloud account for mailing lists, receipts, etc. I keep alerts on for Gmail, off for iCloud and that generally means if I get an email alert it's something I care to be alerted about.

 

[johnnyturbouk]

Not sure I understand -- seems like you already have your email categorized by account. Wouldn't turning off alerts on your Yahoo account insure you won't get alerts for mailing lists and whatnot?

After spending way too much time over the years tuning Gmail filters, using plus-addressing and all this other garbage I finally did more or less what you're doing and partitioned everything by account: Gmail for personal and professional stuff, and an iCloud account for mailing lists, receipts, etc. I keep alerts on for Gmail, off for iCloud and that generally means if I get an email alert it's something I care to be alerted about.

I wanted something like sanebox integrates in apple mail.

 

[ignatius345]

I wanted something like sanebox integrates in apple mail.

Huh, yeah, maybe Siri will get smarter about this in the future. I think for now that app is your answer unless you want to manually set up VIPs.

One thing I've found super useful lately is swiping up to Control Center and holding down the Do Not Disturb button until it reveals a couple great options where you can trigger your phone to be on DND until the end of the current calendar event, or for one hour, or until you leave your current location. Helps me not make the mistake of triggering DND and then realizing hours later it's still on.