iOS 8 Mail: Drafts and notifications

Here are a couple more cool new features that you can expect to see in iOS 8 Mail. iOS 8 will be available for download on Wednesday, September 17, so checking our series of iOS 8 new feature articles is a good way to get up to speed on what to expect.

Have you ever been part way through writing an email and suddenly realized that you need to copy some text from another email? This happens to me all the time, and with iOS 7 and earlier versions, that meant that I had to stop writing, save an email as a draft, find the other email, copy the necessary text, then open the draft and paste it in.

iOS 8 speeds up that process a lot. If you're writing an email and suddenly need to go search in the inbox for another email, just grab the top of the email and drag it to the bottom of your screen. The button bar at the bottom will move up just a bit, and the title of your draft appears at the bottom of the display (see image at the top of this post). Now go off and do what you need to do. When you need to get back to your draft, just tap that draft title at the bottom of the page and it takes over the screen again.

The next tip is something that I've wanted for a long time -- notification that someone has responded to an email thread. There are a couple of ways to set up notification. First, you can just tap on the "flag" button at the bottom of an email that you're reading. A pop-up menu appears with several choices, one of which is "Notify Me...". Tap that item to select it, and the following button appears:

Tapping that button sets up the notification that will arrive in Notification Center whenever someone responds t the thread.

The other way to set up notification is to use one of the new swipe gestures covered in another iOS 8 feature post. When you swipe just a little to the left on a message in the Mail inbox, three buttons appear: More, Flag, and Trash. Tap More, and Notify Me... is one of the choices that you can select.