iOS 16 Mail App: Improved Search, Undo Send, Scheduled Send, Reminders and More

[jhollington]

I am at least happy to see Apple adding common sense features to iOS Mail that should have been done years ago. Now the question is when will they add IMAP IDLE as an option. I know people are going to say it uses more battery life, but given the size of today's batteries it should at least be an option that the user could turn on if they so choose.

Unfortunately, it's not just the battery life. IMAP IDLE is a relatively ancient extension to IMAP from 1997 — an era when nobody really envisioned it being used for mobile devices or even Wi-Fi networks, much less cellular ones. It's a pretty fragile connection that can be very unreliable on the various networks that mobile devices often find themselves on.

I worked with a few email clients on Palm and Symbian devices that supported it in the pre-iPhone days, and it was generally a mess on mobile networks, and even some Wi-Fi networks. A well-behaved IMAP IDLE client would obey the recommendation in RFC 2177 and try to re-establish the connection every 20–30 minutes, but the connection was dropped so often on a mobile device that the net effect was that you might as well just set the mail client to a 15-minute fetch interval. While I'd expect that to get better with 5G, the dream of truly low-latency connectivity over 5G is still in its infancy.

 

[jhollington]

What, wait? Aren't those "Send later" mails put on the iCloud server so that they will be independently sent, even if you turn off your device(s) after that? At least this is the way with other "Send later" solutions like Outlook, Mailbutler, Spark etc. if I'm right ...

No, the feature is entirely local. It's so local, in fact, that queued messages only show up on the devices where you've queued them up. Set an email to "Send Later" on your Mac and you won't have any indication of it on your iPhone — not even as a draft.

The same applies to the "Remind Me Later" feature. Those are set only in the Mail app on whatever platform you're using at the time (iPhone/iPad/Mac). If you "snooze" a message on your iPhone for later today, it will only come up on your iPhone — not your Mac or iPad. Plus, there's no notification at all — it simply goes back to the top of your inbox, with a subtle "Remind Me" tag on it. If you're not actually looking at your iPhone because you're working on your Mac, you'll miss the message entirely.

The implementation is so ridiculously weak right now that I have to assume Apple has some kind of back-end iCloud integration up its sleeve that's simply not ready yet. If iOS 16 ships with the "Remind Me" feature the way it is right now, it's going to be frustratingly useless for anybody who uses Mail on more than one Apple device.

 

[jamdex]

Anyone else lost badges since this update?

 

[marvinhk]

search by "sender contains" is gone, so frustrating, it's more like better indexing but degraded search functionality

 

[DrKostis]

In previous ios we had the option in the search bar for flagged mails or whatever it is called in English 😅 now it seems I cant find it anywhere and since I have multiple mail accounts it’s impossible to find my flagged mails … my help?
thanks in advance !

 

[jhollington]

In previous ios we had the option in the search bar for flagged mails or whatever it is called in English 😅 now it seems I cant find it anywhere and since I have multiple mail accounts it’s impossible to find my flagged mails … my help?
thanks in advance !

It seems to show up for me, although you have to start typing the first few letters of either the word "flagged" (for all flagged emails, or the colour of the specific flag (i.e. "red" or "green" or whatever) if you're looking for only one colour flag. I don't know if the word "flag" or the colours get translated if you're using a different language, but I'd expect so.

 

[DrKostis]

It seems to show up for me, although you have to start typing the first few letters of either the word "flagged" (for all flagged emails, or the colour of the specific flag (i.e. "red" or "green" or whatever) if you're looking for only one colour flag. I don't know if the word "flag" or the colours get translated if you're using a different language, but I'd expect so.

View attachment 2081942

It doesn’t work on Greek nor with English translation

Therefore I just found the solution … in all messages go to changes and then add flagged messages … not it’s a whole section of its own !

Thank you for your willing to help me 🤗

 

[TinaBelcher]

I really wish Apple would add a couple more alias and just sync read messages through iOS devices 😭

 

[magicvash]

This is all fine but it’s 2022 and iOS 16/iPadOS 16 and I still don’t have rules for mail filtering from the macOS version of mail on my iPhone and iPad