A new report found that iPad users spend a large portion of their time sending and receiving emails using the native Mail client. In light of that study, we found five ways to make your iPad email faster and more productive.
1. Change Your Email Signature
It may be a trivial point, but there’s a debate to be had on whether having a “Sent from my iPad” signature is really a good idea.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost, whereas an email signature on your phone may let recipients know that you are out of the office but still responsive, a “Sent from my iPad” could come across as unprofessional (iMore’s Rene Ritchie expands on this point).
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, letting every email recipient know that you have an iPad could make it more likely to be stolen. Granted the odds of this actually happening are low, but why take the risk?
To change your email signature simply head to Settings, Mail, Contacts and Calendars, to Mail and then Signature. You’ll then be able to change the signature as you see fit. If you want to set-up different signatures for different accounts, this is also possible. You just have to tap Advanced and change the email signature per email account.
2. Tweak Your Sounds
Waiting for a business email and want to know instantly when it has arrived? You can do to an extent on the iPad by setting up email alerts and sounds for different email accounts.
Go to Settings, Sounds and you can then configure sounds for new email, sent email, new tweets, Facebook posts, Calendar and even reminder alerts. Pro Tip: Don’t bother tampering with the ringer and alerts volume, because the volume is not affected by tweaking the volume controls.
3. Preview More Emails
The Mail client on the iPad previews two lines of incoming emails by default, but you can adjust this if you would like to see more or less information.
Do this by heading the Mail, contacts and calendars and then Preview. You can then play with the preview options with having no preview lines of the email (so just the person’s email address) or up to five lines of preview text.
4. Turn Off Push Notifications for Low-Priority Mail
It can be difficult keeping on task when your iPad’s notifying you every two minutes about emails that are frankly not so important. Luckily, there are ways to get around this.
In Mail settings, there is an option to Fetch New Data. You can set emails to be fetched every 15 minutes, 30 minutes or hourly or hit the Advanced bar to manually decide per email account.
This may be useful if, for example, you’d rather the iPad fetches your work email but not new messages from any personal accounts. If that were the case you would set the work email to “Fetch” and the personal accounts to “Manual.”
5. Access Your Drafts Faster
If you want to get to your Draft inbox faster than before, there’s a very quick and neat way of doing that. When you’re in the Mail app, simply tap and hold the compose button and you should find the Drafts box appearing in the bottom right hand corner.
6. Set Up VIPs
Another way of keeping an ear and eye out for emails from important contacts is by using the new VIP tool on iOS 6.
Put simply, it allows you to set “VIPs” and prioritize these emails by setting alert sounds for individual contacts. As an added bonus, all emails from these people can be found in the VIP section.
To set VIPs, you need to touch on the blue arrow to the right of the VIP section. It will then show which people are listed as VIPs, give you the option to add more and also enable you to set custom alerts for emails from these people.
You could, for instance, choose to have VIP emails display in a certain way on the lock home screen and pop up with a mail sound.