Email Efficiency on iPhone: Tips for Managing Your Inbox on the Go

For all of the times that you groaned at your inbox in the Mail App on iPhone, iPhone iOS developers say, we have a feature for that. The iPhone was innovated to make your life simpler, and not make you angrier at your email. Most of us started using smartphones so that we COULD read our emails on them, and now we want to hate them. Apple saw that coming and has a solution for almost every single groan that you have with your Mail App.

If you want to sync your calendars but worry too much about third party settings, iPhone can help with the slide of a toggle. If you want to schedule your emails, unsend an email, or create VIPs in your emails so you don’t have to read them all, iPhone has a feature for that. Apple has thought of almost everything that annoys you about living in the digital world, and brought the solution to your fingertips. Most of these things you probably don’t even know about. We all worry about not knowing how to make our iPhone use more efficient. When it comes to email, we have you covered here. Learn how to improve your email efficiency on iPhone right here.

Add VIP To Your Contacts And Change Your Life

For those nights when the Survivor finale is interrupted by an email that can wait a day, a week, or a month, iPhone has an answer. This is the VIP component of your Contacts list that integrates with the Mail App. You don’t want to turn off all of your Mail notifications, because you have a smart phone so that you don’t miss anything.

Now you can decide what you miss and when, or, what you don’t miss. Make your Contacts VIP and then you won’t have to fuss with Notification settings. Open an email from one of your contacts, tap on their email address to open their Contact card, and tap on Add to VIP. Do that with every Contact that you want to read emails from, and the rest you won’t have to deal with until later.

Sync Your Calendars

It is estimated that Microsoft processes 200 million monthly subscriptions for business, and there have been over 100 million downloads of the Outlook app on iPhone. So a few people are using Outlook. Historically speaking, this has been annoying for Outlook users coming to iPhone and wanting to integrate easily. Apple doesn’t want to lose that business to a Windows smartphone or Android, so they have made it easy to use Outlook on iPhone.

The most recent updates to iOS on iPhone include ways to sync Outlook calendar with iPhone. The easiest way to do this is in Settings, by simply toggling on Calendar in your Mail Settings. Open the Settings App on iPhone and go to Mail. Tap Accounts, Add Account, select Outlook, and then follow the onscreen instructions to add Outlook to your smartphone. When the account is setup, go back to Account Settings for Outlook and toggle the Calendar to green. Save the setting, and you will have Outlook calendar syncing and populating onto your iPhone calendar.

Snip Threads and Save Time

Do you get as annoyed when someone responds to a 37 email-long email thread with the word “Great!” Or, you lost the email that said “Great!” and have to spend time locating it all over again. Now you don’t have to spend 20 minutes going through everything to find the most important emails. You can change your email threads in your Mail App so that they come in as separate emails.

Change your thread settings in the Mail App by going to Settings, then Mail, then Threading. You can collapse messages that have already been read, and put the Most Recent Messages on Top to make reading this so much easier. To make your life easier this way you want to Organize By Thread and disable that feature.

Change Your Signature

Are you getting emails from someone with “Sent from my iPhone” a little too often? This may be the default signature for iPhone Mail App, but what many people do not know is that nobody is beholden to it. You can change the signature.

Go to Settings, Mail, Composing, Signature, and you can change the signature in your iPhone. This will improve your efficiency in terms of deciding what devices you want to work on. Nobody needs to know that you are emailing from your iPhone if you don’t want them to, or, the whole world can know if you want them to. You can use the Per Account feature and then you can change the signature for every account.

Use Siri and Notifications for Urgent Matters

Not only do we want to ignore our email sometimes, other times, we need to pay close attention to it. You can get an alert for your email when you are waiting for important email. In the Mail App, go to your email that you are waiting on, and swipe left on it. Here you will get a Notify Me option that you can tap. Now you will be notified when the response comes in and you won’t have to go running to your email anymore to check for something that isn’t there 20 times in a day.

Siri can help too. You can use Siri to send email, search in the Mail App, dictate emails, and mark appointments and reminders in the Calendar and Reminder apps. To some, Siri is the best personal assistant ever, and to others, the most underused assistant. If you have had Siri with older iOS versions on older phones and have become turned off of it, try Siri now. You will love how much more streamlined using Siri can be today. Siri will make your entire email time more efficient than you thought was possible.

Start Using Mail App on iPhone More Efficiently Today

The iPhone was designed to improve your efficiency. Use timers on your phone to determine how much time you spend in the Mail App daily. Then, implement these tips, and use timers on your Mail App usage again. You will see the difference in efficiency for yourself, and maybe even begin loving email again.