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iOS 16 Mail App: Improved Search, Undo Send, Scheduled Send, Reminders and More
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Interesting. I have several apps that do sync notification badges, but apple mail is not. Sounds like there are some bugs that need to be resolved.
This is one of several reasons I've turned off notifications for most things now. Especially the sound notifications as the Mac would ding, a few seconds later the iPad, a few seconds later the phone, a few seconds later the watch. Half the time I'd have already read the email and started to reply on one device before the others even played the tone.
LOTS of much needed improvements - happy to see that!
But....
The biggest omission I see is no support for SmartFolders Syncing Across Devices - Rules too (iCloud rules are a PITA)
BTW Apple this has been a broke feature in Mail since launch :-/
They should've focused on fixing the unread notification badge on ios!!!
The UI needs an overhaul. I'm tired of this large a** font and "cards" design.
The UI needs an overhaul. I'm tired of this large a** font and "cards" design.
My understanding is that they remain on device only and some sort of daemon (not sure of the iOS app level terminology) will send it at the desired time.
Even if that's case of every email app as you suggest. How is that an excuse for apple to take so long to come out with these features?
It's like all the new features on iMessage. Great but if I can't use them to communicate with people on Android what's the point in having group chats or one on one chats with android users? If you don't have any android users in your circle you probably have a small circle and I guess it works for you but not for most.
Yes. Mainly because I just don't trust that other software isn't prying into my mail somehow. I'm not accusing any app in particular, it's more this day and age where there's just so much data mining.
Maybe the next iteration of the beta will address this issue... 🤷♂️ Until then I continue to use Spark on the desktop and on my iOS platforms 🙏
Spark is really dodgy ... where i work, we are free to use any email client we want ... literally, they do not allow spark quoting "security issues".
I use Canary on Mac and iOS. Had to pay for it ... sucked. But, it's basically mac and iPad OS mail on steroids, although it does seem to lack lately.
Dunno if anyone else has responded but you are currently able to do this. You just have to drag and drop an email into reminders and it will create a new reminder linked to it. You can also do it from the share sheet:
OS X: https://support.apple.com/guide/reminders/add-a-reminder-from-another-app-remn1f735fdc/mac
iOS: https://www.cultofmac.com/641328/finally-ios-13-can-create-reminders-from-mail/
I only figured this out myself yesterday. Apple doesn't do a great job of telling you what apps can create reminders (so far I've seen Mail, Calendar, Notes, and Safari)
This is a serious problem with iCloud accounts and a somewhat lesser problem with most others. It's caused entirely by push notifications, and there's probably not much Apple can do about it for third-party accounts — at least not without draining your iPhone battery much more quickly.
There's only one mail provider I'm aware of that does this properly: Fastmail. That's because they implemented Apple's iCloud-style Push Notification system in 2015 — and, unlike Apple, Fastmail did it right.
If you're using iCloud Mail, the default setting is to use push notifications for new mail messages. This allows you to get notifications of those messages on your iPhone (or iPad) as soon as they arrive in your inbox. Unfortunately, Apple only uses push notifications for new messages. It doesn't push other mailbox changes at all. As a result, the badge count doesn't get updated until either another new message comes in or you open the Mail app manually to check for new mail.
Technically speaking, push notifications for Apple Mail don't update your badge count directly. Instead, they simply tell Apple Mail to go and check for mail in the background. That background process is what updates the badge count. iCloud Mail only sends out these notifications when a new message arrives, and hence Apple Mail on iPhone/iPad only check for new email in the background when new mail comes in.
You can set your iCloud account to "Fetch" under your Mail settings. The minimum interval is 15 minutes, but at least you won't have to live with a stale unread count all day. Fetch is also the default when used with other mail providers that don't support Apple's proprietary push notification system — which is almost all of them.
Originally, Apple Mail push notifications were only enabled by iCloud (MobileMe in those days) and Yahoo. It was also available on Apple's OS X Mail Server, but it worked the same way there as it did on iCloud — new mail only. I hacked together my own solution to make the OS X Mail Server push updates in 2012, but I kind of gave up on that after Fastmail joined the party in 2015, since they had also done it properly.
Fastmail doesn't just push unread messages, but also other mailbox updates like moving, flagging/unflagged, and deleting messages. It can even send push notifications for secondary folders so that they're always up to date. Again, there's not a lot of magic here — all Fastmail is doing is generating a notification to tell Apple Mail to do a background refresh whenever anything changes in your mailbox. It would be trivially easy for Apple to do the same thing with iCloud, but for whatever reason it's chosen not to. There may be a scalability issue here, since this would significantly increase the number of push notifications coming out of Apple's servers, but I suspect the real reason is simply that Apple can't be bothered fixing it because most iCloud Mail users just don't care that much.
As an aside, this push notification system only applies to the iPhone and iPad. The macOS Mail app uses a different feature called IMAP IDLE to maintain a persistent connection to the mail server. That's why messages still come in instantly on your Mac from most mail providers. However, IMAP IDLE doesn't work well on a mobile device as it consumes a lot of power to keep the server connection open all the time and it expects your connection to be persistent, not regularly hopping between multiple Wi-Fi and cellular data networks.
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While Apple could probably do a better job of explaining this to folks who are wondering why it works with every other app, the reason Apple Mail doesn't support it is actually pretty simple.
There is no universal push standard for mobile email apps. The closest is IMAP IDLE, but that's a protocol extension that was designed in the days of desktop PCs and there are several reasons why that doesn't work well with mobile devices.
Every third-party iOS mail app has to roll its own support. First-party apps from mail providers (e.g. Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail, etc), can generate these push notifications from their own servers directly to their own apps, just like Facebook and Twitter do for social media. Third-party apps like Spark rely on an intermediate server to handle the push notifications for you. Even Outlook does this if you configure it with non-Outlook/Exchange mail servers.
What you're effectively doing is handing over your login credentials to the developer so they can store them on their server to log into your account and check for new mail on your behalf. These servers generally maintain a persistent connection to your mailbox (likely using IMAP IDLE) to see when new mail comes in or other changes are made. When that happens, it's the developer's server, not your mail provider, that's sending out the push notification to their app.
There are obvious privacy and security concerns with this, but it's up to each individual user how much they trust these apps and developers to have access to their mailboxes. However, make no mistake, you are most definitely giving a third party access to your mail, and there have been some serious concerns raised with a few of them.
It's pretty easy to understand why Apple wants no part of this with Apple Mail, especially since it's already designed its own push notification system for Apple Mail and made it available to any mail provider who wants to get on board. It's just very few of them seem to have any interest in doing so.
I'm not sure when Apple changed that, but it's been there for a while. I think it arrived in iOS 13 when Apple added the new rich formatting features in Mail.
I know what you're talking about, though. It used to be quite annoying.
Sadly, no. Still can't do that in Notes on the iPhone either.
However, Mail does support rich links now, so when you paste in a link it will show up in a preview like it does in Messages or Notes....
