iPhone eMail Tricks and Treats

eMail on the iPhone is a mixed bag of goodies and gaffs.

The one feature that invariably makes everyone go "ohhh" is when you rotate the iPhone 90 degrees and the screen goes wide in response. This useful feature is available in the browser, in the iPod mode, and with the YouTube video display. But when you try that in the native Mail application it only makes your head tilt as you try to read the text sideways. There is some consolation in that we are given three different text sizes in the Mail application Settings.

The message administration functions are limited to handling one message at a time. There's no way to deal with groups of messages, e.g. Delete All Read, Mark All Read/Unread. There is no automatic message filtering or sorting capability at this time.

Creating a connection to an existing email account is easy, especially if it is with either Y!Mail, Gmail, .mac or AOL. The 'Other' category covers IMAP, Exchange with IMAP enabled and POP mailboxes. The iPhone does handle multiple email accounts easily. You can assign one account to be the default but the number of unread messages displayed on the front panel will still be the sum of the unread messages in each account you've connected.

Each shiny new email connection you create comes with two mailboxes, Inbox and Trash although it appears to be ready to handle at least seven more folders. There does not seem to be a way to create additional folders of your own to organize the messages. You won't see a Sent folder until you actually send a message. An Outbox folder appears when it's time to handle a message that could not be sent on the first try. (Force a retry by restarting the phone.)

You can save a draft of a message and it will be stored in a Drafts folder but getting there is not an intuitive maneuver. While you are composing a message, hit Cancel and you will be offered a Save / Don't Save option. If you hit Save it will appear in the Drafts folder.

If want to clean a message out of your Inbox quickly, try sliding your finger from right to left across message's subject+preview text area. A handy Delete button will appear.

If you need to recover a deleted message open the Trash folder, then open the message, then click the small folder icon at lower right, then click the Inbox folder. (*whew* that could've been easier)

The iPhone will handle a short list of attachments but it's an odd mix that's heavy in a number of file types that only a developer would crave:

.c, .cpp, .h, .hpp, .patch , .diff

Next, they covered bare necessities:

.htm, .html, .txt

Then made a few curtsey's to the MS Office world but notably chose to omit Powerpoint documents:

.doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx

I lean toward believing the gang over at Wolfram Research must have given them one for free. Either that or the Apple employees are passing around Mathematica data files in those chain letters that everyone gets. You can also view a mind map output file:

.m, .mm

The crown jewel, I suppose, is the Portable Document Format File. Yes, that is correct. You can open a PDF file on the iPhone.

.pdf

And while you may have to wait several minutes for it to load, you can even use it to view the iPhone manual ;-)