iPhone mail: the sequel

In my post yesterday I whined quite a bit about how it was hard to get control of mail on the iPhone because there was not a unified mailbox. The post obviously struck a nerve, because there were lots of responses and in our little poll most people seemed to agree that mail was pretty much a mess and needed some love from the Apple development team.

There were also many people who made very valid comments about other things that were missing from mail, and I wanted to share those as well. Here they are, in no particular order.

• Mail needs to allow searching. With a lot of messages things are difficult to find. (The people who invented Spotlight on OS X shouldn't find that too difficult)
• People want individual signatures for each email account. Again, not rocket science.
• Many readers wanted to see quick on-screen buttons to move expeditiously from one mail account to another.
• Others wanted to make sure accounts stayed separate. I agree with this, I just wanted a visual or virtual joining of the messages so I would not have to finger dance all over the screen to navigate between accounts. In other words, the way it works in Apple Mail in Leopard.
• Finally, as with all things software, people wanted software switches to turn these features on and off.

It may be that Apple is just getting these features ready for the next iPhone software update, or they may still be ignoring these issues. I have to think if they are using their iPhones at all over in Cupertino, these items will be high on their list of fixes.

Thanks to all who participated in the poll — even those who thought everything was just dandy in iPhone mail.