Apple gives Mail a much needed facelift in iOS 5

Considering the Mail app is one of the most used apps in iOS, it is shocking that they haven’t improved the features before now. In the next rev of iOS we will see a much more functional and robust Mail app. They’ve added better formatting, in message search, built in dictionary, security and flag for follow up features.

Indentation control is a new feature, although I’m  not sure I’ve ever cursed the skies that I couldn’t indent on my iPhone. Must be an asked for feature though.

Rich text formatting, which I have needed, will also be available. Now you can italicize, bold and underline for emphasis in Mail.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve tried to drag a recipient from the To: field to the CC: field or vice versa. Now I’ll be able to.

You can now search in an entire message. To be honest, I assumed it was doing that already. Explains why I always have such crappy results on my iPhone.

Flag message for follow up is another new feature. I’m not sure that being able to flag for follow up has been a sore spot for many. But at least we won’t have to use wonky work arounds anymore, like marking a message as unread just so it is brought to our attention later.

A little nod from Apple to enterprise with the addition of S/MIME.

While this isn’t a Mail specific feature, I thought it was important to include mention that Apple has included a real dictionary, system wide, in iOS 5. No more copying a word and taking it to Safari so you can make sure you are using it correctly.

Some of these feature have been painfully missing for so many years, I’m extremely excited for this update. What do you guys think? Did they miss anything you’ve been waiting for? Let us know in the comments.

Photo Credit: Engadget

Apple Systems Admin for mac-fusion, which is just a fancy name for a tech. For the last 12 years I've been fixing Macs and we specialize in helping businesses run their company on a Mac. If you like Mac tweets, follow me on Twitter.