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Four features I’d love to see come to Mail on iOS

While there is a lot of great options for iOS mail clients, the built-in client is no slouch. Even after extended periods using third-party clients, I tend to always end up using the official app from Apple.

While it’s probably in need of an overhaul design-wise, it still holds up day to day use cases for me. I get a lot of email during the day, and I still feel like I can power through email on the iOS app just as well as I can anything else.

There are some features that I hope it gets in iOS 13 that would take it to the next level. Here they are:

Share sheet on an actual message

We’ve been able to use the share sheet on attachments for a while now, but I want to be able to do this on the actual email message. This feature would allow me to add an email to my task manager (without needing to forward it), send to the Reminders app, etc.

Snooze on location (or time)

I’m a big believer in keeping my e-mail inbox clear, but I get emails all throughout the weekend as well. I’d love to be able to move a message to a “snooze” folder until I was at a certain location. I can imagine this playing out where I can swipe on a message, tap on a snooze icon, and mark Home, Work, New location, etc. These locations are already set up for my contact card, and it would be easy to move these items back into the inbox at a certain location. Also, I’d love to see a snooze until a certain time as well.

Send later

There are times when I want to write an email, but don’t want it sent until the next morning. I’d love to be able to pre-schedule an email to be sent at a certain time. Especially for iCloud accounts, Apple would hold the email on the server.

With other accounts, they could leave it in the Outbox until a specific time. Since iPhones all have LTE, they’d be able to send regardless of Wi-Fi connectivity. Connectivity is not always a given so Apple would have to inform users that sending later would require connectivity.

E-mail sync schedule

My original smartphone was the Motorola Q running Windows. At my job, we were using Microsoft Exchange, so it was using the ActiveSync protocol. One of the things I loved about it was I could set a sync schedule. If you visit this old Verizon support document, you can get an idea of how this worked.

I’d love to see iOS do this for email accounts. What I’d like to do is to set my work email to only sync a few times on the weekend. Yes, I know you can turn off universal inbox, set Do-Not-Disturb hours, set sync to manual, etc. I don’t want to use DND all weekend long, and setting up the other features requires me to turn it off and back on. On Saturdays, I want to be able to open my email app on iOS, see any personal messages, but not have it refresh my work accounts each time.


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