iPhone Fixes We Want to See

Mail

Overall, we love Mail--in many ways, it's the best mobile e-mail client any of us has used. But there's the rub: Because it's so good in so many ways, the places it goes wrong are glaringly, frustratingly, head-slappingly obvious. In fact, of all the built-in applications, Mail is the one that generated the most feature/improvement requests in our informal, internal poll.

Create a unified inbox: A unified inbox--like the one found in Mac OS X's Mail program--would ease the tap-heavy task of checking new messages across multiple e-mail accounts. It takes three taps to go into an account, grab a mailbox on that account, and open the first message, and three taps to get back out. Multiply that across four or five e-mail accounts, and you've got a lot of tapping ahead of you that would be entirely eliminated if Apple added a single unified inbox.

Make it easier to delete message en masse: On the iPhone, there's no easy way to delete more than one e-mail message at a time. Combine that fact with the iPhone's lack of any sort of junk-mail filtering, and deleting all those e-mail offers for low-priced medicine and penny stocks becomes a repetitive--literally--drag.

Let users mark all messages as read: Just as the ability deleting messages in one fell swoop is missing from the iPhone, so is a way to mark all messages as read. It shouldn't be.

Force messages to display as plain text: Many people dislike HTML-formatted email. Spammers use it way too often, image-heavy messages take a long time to download, and, quite frankly, many pre-made HTML message templates are just plain ugly. On your Mac, you can use a hidden Mail preference to force all messages to display in plain text mode. That preference is missing from the iPhone--you're stuck with a veritable barrage of image-laden and slow-to-load HTML messages.

Add more flexible options for selecting text to be quoted in replies: We've already noted that you can't select text on the iPhone; that goes for replying to messages, too. You have no control over how much of the original e-mail gets quoted. There's also no setting for enabling or disabling quoting in general; Mail on the iPhone automatically quotes the entire message when you start your reply. Adding these capabilities would be a big step toward making the iPhone's Mail even more like its OS X counterpart.

Make picture-sending easier: If you have a series of photos to send off to someone--pictures of the kids, say, that you want to share with their grandparents--you're going to have to send a series of e-mails. You can only select one photo at a time; a multiple selection tool would make things much easier.

Allow images from e-mails to be saved to the Photos app: Photos received in Mail are stuck there; you can't add e-mailed images to the iPhone's Photos application--at least not easily. You could move the photos into iPhoto on your computer, and then add them to the iPhone the next time you sync, but this is a capability you should be able to do entirely from your phone. --Rob Griffiths