Other Sites

For almost all of us these days, email is a critical part of our communication system. For myself, email is the first thing I check in the morning and the last thing I do before heading off to bed. I communicate with business associates, friends, family, and customers via email, so naturally I was interested in the iPhone's email support. I wasn't super-excited, mainly because I'd heard such negatives about the virtual keyboard, and I couldn't imagine typing elaborate messages on such a small device. But I figured that at least being able to monitor my Inbox would be helpful, and perhaps it would work to send a quick "Got your message, will respond later" kind of thing.

Setting up email accounts on the iPhone can be astonishingly easy -- if you use Apple Mail. Users of Mail will find that syncing the iPhone automatically copies over all email account settings, so you don't have to configure a thing on the iPhone. Now that is sweet indeed! (I can confirm this worked without a hitch on my mom's iPhone.)

Unfortunately, in my case I only use Mail on my laptop for certain email accounts while the bulk of my mail is routed to my desktop running Bare Bones Software's Mailsmith. This meant I had to manually configure an email account on the iPhone. I decided I wouldn't use an existing account, since I get a ton of email (including lots of junk mail). For now, I prefer handling that bulk on a full computer, but perhaps in the future I might change that.

My web hosting package includes tons of email accounts I'm not using, so I decided to establish a new one, custom for the iPhone. This only took a few minutes and I quickly used the account information to establish a new IMAP account on the iPhone. Mail accounts are configured within Settings, not within Mail itself, and the options are standard things like incoming and outgoing mail servers, etc. If you're configuring a Yahoo, AOL, GMail, or .Mac account, you just need your username and password.

Yahoo is supposed to support "push" email -- instead of you having to periodically check for email, Yahoo immediately signals your phone when new email arrives. I had an old Yahoo account and so I tried this, but never could get the push feature to work. It worked fine as a standard email account, so I suppose there must be someway to activate the push, but I couldn't figure it out and Yahoo's help was useless. (The only mentions of iPhone I could find were an unanswered push question on Yahoo's FAQ page and advertising.)

One nice feature is that you can set up multiple email accounts on the iPhone but only activate the ones you want to use. This can be helpful for an account you may normally not want to bother accessing via the iPhone, but might need when you go on vacation or a trip or an emergency situation. Just turn it on for that account to show up in iPhone's Mail and turn it off later, when you don't need it any more.

One criticism of multiple accounts on the iPhone is you have to manually switch to each account's Inbox to find new email -- there's no global Inbox for all your mail. This didn't really bother me because I keep my Inboxes separate anyway (on my full computers). I have several unrelated businesses and it's too confusing dumping all the email into a single Inbox -- I need that separation. But everyone's workflow is different, so keep that limitation in mind if you're considering an iPhone.

A more serious issue is that iPhone has no support for mail filters, junk or even standard Subject or name-based filtering. Since iPhone's Mail client is very simple -- at this time there's no way to delete or file multiple messages so you must move or delete each message one by one -- this is a serious limitation if you get a lot of email. For ten or thirty messages a day, this probably isn't an issue, or if you use an IMAP account and primarily manage your email on a full computer and just want the iPhone for emergencies or occasional access or notification. Some proprietary email accounts (like Yahoo, GMail, AOL, .Mac, etc.) include their own filtering and don't have this limitation.

But if you do get a lot of email and intend to manage it on the iPhone, my advice would be to set up a separate iPhone email account. On your real computer you can set up filters to forward just certain emails to the phone's account, or let critical people know the iPhone's email for urgent communications.

Apple has purposely limited iPhone's Mail to keep it simple. For instance, you cannot create new folders (mailboxes) on the iPhone, but if you do on your full computer, they automatically show up on the iPhone (at least for IMAP accounts).

I must say I'm really impressed with IMAP for email. I haven't used IMAP all that much as most of my email accounts are older POP accounts (I've had them for years and my main email program, Mailsmith, does not support IMAP). But seeing how well IMAP works with the iPhone has got me tempted to change. I use multiple computers already, so I've been leaning in the IMAP direction already. With IMAP I'm able to access my email from desktop/laptop clients, via any web browser, and via iPhone's Mail application. Any changes I make in any of those places -- new mailboxes, marking an email as read or unread, moving/deleting email, etc. -- automatically shows up every place where I check that email account.

I had set my mom up with an IMAP account for her email and so far it's working really well. She used to be able to check her email on her laptop with either Apple Mail or any web browser; now she also gets her email on her iPhone. She can then decide to respond on the iPhone or via her MacBook, depending on the urgency and the length of response required. She's usually a slow email responder -- she's not much into technology -- so I couldn't believe it that on just her second day of iPhone usage she responded to an email right after it came in. I didn't tell her to do it or even how to do it. She did it all on her own, which is a testament to the ease of use and convenient of the iPhone.

As far as using the iPhone's Mail client, it's pretty basic. Mail itself shows you a list of accounts you've configured. Tapping any of these displays the folders (mailboxes) for that account. The quantity of unread messages is indicated in parenthesis after the box's name (i.e. "Inbox (3)").

Tapping a folder, such as Inbox, displays the messages. The message list display is excellent, showing you the sender's name in a large font with the subject smaller underneath. On the left side there's a blank area that shows a gray curved arrow for emails you've replied to, a straight right arrow for forwards received, and a blue circle for emails you haven't read.

On the right side in blue is the date the email arrived. iPhone is intelligent about dates -- if the email arrived today, you see the time it arrived; if it's less than a week old it just puts the day. Email older than a week gets the date in numeric format.

What's really sweet here is that iPhone shows you a preview of each email -- just the first few lines (the amount of preview is controlled within Settings, so you can adjust this to your preference). This is really handy as often the subject line doesn't tell you much about the actual content.

On this message list screen there are really only five actions you can take: there's a New Message button in the lower right which creates a blank message, a "refresh" or "check mail" button on the lower left, an account name at the top left that returns you to your mail accounts list of mailboxes, an edit button at the top right that lets you delete messages, and of course you can tap a message to display it.

When you are displaying a message, there are next/previous buttons at the top, and five special buttons at the bottom. These are "Check Mail," "Move," "Delete," "Reply," and "Create New Message." Move brings up a list of mailboxes in this account -- you can either choose one or cancel, that's about it. The "Reply" button brings up a dialog which asks you to choose "Reply" or "Forward" or "Cancel."

As I said, pretty basic stuff. I have heard criticisms that the reply feature does not offer a Reply All option, so if you're used to sending emails to groups of people you have to manually add the other recipients.

The new message feature works well. The cursor is set in the "To" field and anything you type on the virtual keyboard brings up a list of matching contacts. You can type letters from the person's name, company, or email and they'll show up in the list, which is nice (you're not forced to only bring up contacts by name). You can also type the "+" button and select a person from your Contacts list.

There is a "CC" field for sending a copy of the email to additional people, but no BBC (Blind Carbon Copy). I don't know why we need the CC field since you can add multiple people to the "To" field, but I suppose it's useful.

The Return key on the keyboard acts like a Tab key, moving the cursor to the next field (or you can tap the field you want), which is handy.

The keyboard is intelligent. For instance, when you're on the "To" or "CC" fields, the Shift key is not pressed, but on the Subject or Body areas, it is.

Your signature (set within Settings -- unfortunately there's only one for all your mail accounts) shows up at the bottom of your message.

If you're replying to an email the full content of the previous email is quoted below. I'm not sure I like that I as usually trim my quoted content to the bare minimum to remind the receiver what we're talking about. I also like to intersperse my response with their original text. But iPhone doesn't have a way to select blocks of text. You can delete the text manually, letter by letter, pressing the Delete key a zillion times, but that's a bother.

To send the message you press the Send button and off it goes. If there's an error, you'll receive a message that it couldn't send the email. If you cancel the new message, you're given a clear "Save/Don't Save" choice.

Note that there's no support for adding attachments or URLs to an existing message. However, you can share a URL by clicking the "Share" button within Safari, which will create a new message with the URL inside it for you. You can then add additional text if you wish. In the same way, within Photos, you can choose an option to "Send a Photo" to someone, which creates an email with a copy of the photo inside it. You can type additional text before or after the photo, but there's no way to send multiple photos at once -- you'd have to send each as separate emails.

Overall, iPhone Mail is simple and remarkably elegant. It's missing a few features which might be helpful (i.e. filtering), but they would also add complexity. I'm not sure Apple really wants iPhone Mail to be so powerful. It's designed as a helpful addition to your full computer, not a replacement. Apple is not really targeting iPhone against Blackberries, for instance. But there are ways some additional functionality could be added for power users without it confusing consumer users -- via an Advanced Options pane, for instance, so some things could be hidden until turned on.

Next: In Part 9, Marc actually uses the iPhone as a Phone.

macopinion@designwrite.com

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 1 of 10
Buying the iPhone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 2 Of 10
Activation and Syncing

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 3 of 10
Using the iPhone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 4 of 10
Customization

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 5 of 10
Exploring the Applications

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 6 of 10
Exploring the Internet

iPhone: First Impressions Part 7 of 10
Exploring Photography on the iPhone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 8 of 10
Working With eMail

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 9 of 10
Using the iPhone as a Phone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 10 of 10
iPod on the iPhone