Add some emphasis to your text

Want to give the words in your mail message some extra zing? If you like, you can italicize, bold and underline any selected text within your message.

The iOS Mail app lets you bold, italicize or underline words in the body of your message.

Just tap a word, tap the Select button in the black bubble to reveal the text selector, then drag the little black handles until you’ve selected all the words you want to modify.

Next, tap the BIU button in the black bubble above the selected text. (You may need to tap the arrow on the right side of the bubble to reveal the BIU button). Now, go ahead and tap Bold, Italic, or Underline.

Recover an accidentally deleted iOS Mail message

So, you’re rapidly deleting messages by swiping them in your iOS Mail inbox, when suddenly you trash a message you didn’t want to delete. Sound familiar?

Accidentally delete a mail message? Just shake your iPhone to reveal the “Undo Trash” pop-up.

Well, you could try poking your way around your various Trash folders to find the accidentally deleted message, or try this: just shake your iPhone.

When you do, an “Undo Trash” pop-up will appear. Tap the Undo button, and the message you mistakenly deleted will reappear in your inbox.

Note: Is the “shake-to-undelete” trick not working? Tap Settings, General, Accessibility, Shake to Undo, and make sure the switch is turned on.

Mark up attachments and sign PDFs

Got a PDF attachment in an iOS Mail message that you need to sign? Instead of printing the PDF, signing it, scanning it, and sending it back, you can sign the PDF directly on your iPhone or iPad.

Just open the message, tap the PDF, then tap the Markup button (the one that looks like a little toolbox) at the bottom corner of the screen.

Once you’ve traced your signature, just drag it where you want it to appear, then drag the handles to resize it.

Next, tap the signature button (in the bottom right corner), then follow the prompts to trace your signature (which will be saved for future use).

Once that’s done, your signature will appear on the PDF, surrounded by a thin box with handles on each corner. Tap and drag the signature to move it, then tap and drag a handle to resize the signature.

Adding signatures to a PDF isn’t the only thing the Markup tool can do. You can also draw lines, circles and arrows (just tap the Draw button), add captions or text (tap the Text button), or even add a magnifying glass to zoom in on a detail.

All finished? Tap the Done button, and the iOS Mail app will put marked-up PDF in a new Reply message.

Get an alert whenever a “VIP” sends you a mail message

If you’re like me, you don’t want to get an iOS notification each and every time you receive a new message in the iOS Mail app. Instead, you’d only like alerts when someone important—a loved one, a boss, or anyone else in your inner circle—sends you a message.

You’ll never miss a mail message from your boss again once you’ve added him to iOS Mail’s VIP list.

The trick: adding your most important contacts to your iOS “VIP” list. Once you do, you’ll get special VIP notifications whenever people on your VIP list send you mail messages, meaning you can (if you like) safely turn off Mail notifications for everyone else.

Open the Mail app, then tap the Back button in the top-left corner of the screen until you arrive at the mail Mailboxes screen.

Next, find the VIP mailbox (if you don’t see it, tap Edit, then make sure the starred VIP mailbox is checked), then tap the little “i” next to it.

Finally, tap Add VIP, then start adding contacts from your contact list.

Once you’ve added some new VIPs, tap the VIP Alerts button, then customize your VIP notifications. You could, for instance, change the alert tone for your VIPs, change the style of the alert (to, say, an Alert that must be manually cleared), or allow VIP notifications to appear on the iOS lock screen.

Get alerts when people reply to a specific e-mail thread

If you want to know the moment someone replies to an important e-mail conversations—anything from “Let’s do dinner!” to “Year-end review”—there’s an easy way to do it.

Tap “Notify Me” to get alerts whenever someone responds to a specific e-mail thread.

From right to left, swipe the message thread for which you’d like to get alerts. Next, tap More, then tap Notify Me.

A “Notify Me” confirmation will pop up on the screen; tap it to start getting notifications when anyone responds to the thread.

To turn the alerts off, just swipe the message from right to left again, tap More, then tap “Stop Notifying.”

To customize the type of alert you’ll get when someone replies to the e-mail thread, tap Settings, Notifications, Mail, Thread Notifications.

Click here for more iOS tips!

The post iOS tip: 5 gotta-know Mail tricks for iPhone and iPad appeared first on here's the thing.

Tap the “Add Attachment” button to get started attaching Dropbox and Google Drive files to Mail messages.

Now, I’d assumed until very recently that the iOS Mail app wouldn’t let you attach any cloud-based files to mail messages beyond those in iCloud Drive, Apple’s own cloud storage service.

Since I pretty much never use iCloud Drive—I’m a Dropbox and Google Drive person, through and through—I figured I’d never tap Mail’s “Add Attachment” button.

Well, guess what? You can attach Dropbox and Google Drive files to Mail messages, but you have to know where to tap first.

To get started, create a new Mail message on your iPhone or iPad, tap and hold the cursor anywhere in the body of the message, then tap the “Add Attachment” button in the black bubble that appears. (If you don’t see the “Add Attachment” button, tap the arrow on the right side of the bubble to scroll through all the available buttons.)

Tap “Locations” to switch to another cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive while attaching files to iOS Mail messages.

Once you tap “Add Attachment,” you’ll see a window displaying all your iCloud Drive files—either that, or you’ll see a “No Documents” banner if you haven’t enabled iCloud Drive yet. (You can skip enabling iCloud Drive if you want.)

Next, tap the Locations button in the top-left corner of the screen. If you have Dropbox, Google Drive or another cloud-based storage app on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll see buttons for each one. Don’t see any buttons? If so, tap More, then flip the switch next to any installed storage apps you want to enable.

Don’t see Dropbox or Google Drive in the Location menu when trying to attach files to an iOS Mail message? Tap More, the flip the switches for the services you want to enable.

Finally, tap the button of the cloud storage account you want to use—Dropbox, Google Drive, or another service—then search for a file. Once you’ve found the one you want to send, tap it, and Mail will attach it to your message.

Bonus tip

If you have iCloud Drive enabled on your iPhone or iPad, your iCloud Drive files will always be the first thing you see when you tap the Add Attachment button in a Mail message. If you disable iCloud Drive, though, you can pick a new default cloud service for attachments; it’ll be whichever cloud app is first in your list of Locations. To rearrange the list, tap and drag the three-line handles next to each listed cloud app.

Click here for more iOS tips!

The post iOS tip: How to attach Dropbox and Google Drive files to Mail messages appeared first on here's the thing.

One way to get the message back is to return to the Mailboxes screen (tap the Back button in the top-left corner of the display), open the right mail account, tap the Trash mailbox, then scroll through and look for the message you accidentally deleted. If you get a lot of e-mails, finding the right message could be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Want to undelete an accidentally trashed mail message? Just give your iPhone a shake.

Luckily, there’s a much easier way to recover deleted emails, assuming you catch your mistake quickly enough.

The secret: just give your iPhone a shake.

When you do, an “Undo Trash” pop-up will appear. Tap “Undo,” and the message you just deleted will jump back into your Mail inbox.

Yes, it’s the same trick as shaking your iPhone to undo your typing—except in this case, the action we’re undoing is trashing a mail message.

But there’s a catch

However… the iPhone’s shake-to-undo feature only works for the last action you took.

That means if you want to recover a deleted email by shaking your iPhone, deleting the message must have been the last thing you did. If, instead, you trashed an e-mail and then began typing a new message, shaking your iPhone will only delete what you just typed, leaving your deleted message lost in the trash.

Click here for more iOS tips!

The post iOS tip: An easy way to recover deleted e-mails out of the trash appeared first on here's the thing.

A simple iOS Mail search will yield all e-mail messages that contains the person’s name, whether it appeared in the “From” field or not.

As you type, you’ll see possible matches appear below under the “People” heading; if you see a matching name or email address, go ahead and tap it.

Luckily, there is a way to search only the “From” line—or the “To” or “Subject” lines, for that matter—of your email messages. Like many things in iOS these days, the method isn’t immediately obvious.

• First, tap the search box in Mail (drag down a bit on your inbox to reveal it, if necessary), then tap in the name.
• As you type, you’ll see possible matches appear below under the “People” heading, including the names of people in your iOS contacts as well as email addresses of folks with whom you’ve traded mail messages. If you see a matching name or email address, go ahead and tap it—and when you do, the name will jump into the search box, outlined in gray.
• Now, tap the name once more, and you’ll see three new tabs appear: From, To, and Message. Since we want to see all the email messages we’ve received from the contact, we’ll tap From. You can also tap To to see see only the messages you’ve sent to the contact, or Message to see everything.

You can also search only the subject line of your iOS mail messages.

Want to search only the subject line of your mail messages? Try this…

• Go back to the search box, tap in a name, a word, or anything you want. As you type, you’ll see (again) a list of possible subject matches beneath the search box. Go ahead and tap a match, or simply tap “Search for [what you just typed]” directly under the search field.
• Your search phrase will pop into the search box, once again outlined in gray. Tap the phrase to reveal a pair of tabs: Subject and Message. Tap Subject to find messages with your search phrase in the subject line.

Click here for more iOS tips!

The post iOS tip: Search the “To,” “From” or “Subject” fields of E-mail messages appeared first on here's the thing.

You could try finding them by tapping your way back to a specific mail account and opening the Drafts folder, but that could take some doing—especially if you’re starting from the All Inboxes folder, or if you’re not sure which email account your draft is sitting in.

Your Mail drafts are just a “long-press” of the Compose button away.

Well, good news: there’s an easier way to pull up your saved email drafts for all your iPhone/iPad email accounts, and it’s just a “long-press” away.

See the “Compose” button in the bottom-right corner of the Mail interface? Tap and hold it.

When you do, a window will slide up with a list of all your mail drafts, across all your accounts.

Just tap a draft to pick up where you left off.

Click here for more iOS tips!

The post iOS tip: Looking for your draft Mail messages? Here’s a shortcut appeared first on here's the thing.