All My Mail Makes Email Searching Easier On iPhones
iPhone/iPod touch: The biggest problem with the iPhone’s email client is its lack of search. All My Mail can’t compose messages, but its free version lets you search Gmail, AOL or Exchange messages pretty easily.
After creating an account with Attassa (which, for this tester this morning, was a bit buggy), you’ll be able to add one Gmail, AOL or (with a plugin) Outlook email account to your All My Mail app for synchronisation and searching; the paid version and a monthly fee gets you more than one account at a time.
All My Mail organises and sorts your mail primarily by contacts and attachments, and is kind of smart about it. It groups together email addresses with similar or the same contact names under one heading, and can recreate Gmail’s threaded message view by analysing the messages you’re trading back and forth. There’s an attachment-only view you can flip to when you need to find one particular Word document from a guy named Bob, and the email search and sorting felt fairly responsive in our own tests.
All My Mail has a somewhat lacking security notice, stating only that all transmissions are SSL-encrypted and that their database is encrypted as well. If you’re concerned about third-party access to your email, you might want to consider waiting to see if the 3.0 iPhone update brings in something worthwhile in email search. Otherwise, All My Mail is a neat little utility that can’t be your all-in-one mail client, but does make up for one of the iPhone’s glaring deficiencies.
Here’s the official video tour of All My Mail:
All My Mail’s free/lite edition is a free download for the iPhone or iPod touch, requires 2.0 or later firmware. Attassa All my mail [via TechCrunch]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
@Dan Fox: I'd like to agree with Mr. Fox's contention. I have the 3.0 beta as well, and e-mail search has been great. The only problem I have witnessed would be that you can only search somewhat recent e-mails as the client doesn't keep it's fingers dug very far into your e-mail history.
This is a problem for someone like me who receives 100's of e-mails everyday. If I'm out somewhere and I need to find an e-mail I'm almost always better off using the gmail.com client instead.
As well, the threaded view feature is quite nice but is perhaps not what I'm looking for given the security issues mentioned in the original post.
David Spatholt
Not quite a ringing (ha!) endorsement, so no hurry to try this.
Bocachica
its a bit of a hassle, but you can already search gmail accounts using their updated iPhone interface. Not nearly as convenient as being able to search directly from the eMail Client...but it gets the job done.
Stopped reading at "after creating an account with Attassa"
robdew
@Mike Pulaski:
cut-n-paste is pretty useful for me, too
gmerin
This feature is available in the 3.0 beta, and works great!
Still waiting for the ability to "Mark as Read" a whole inbox full of messages (or mark all for delete) and also need to be able to flag emails on my iPhone.
Dan Fox
this is probably one of the more useful and under-hyped features of os 3.0
Mike Pulaski
@gmerin: Both are great, but I think mail search might even be more useful. Actually, the feature I'm looking forward to the most is the landscape keyboard in Mail and other programs. THAT is going to make my life SO much easier. I can't believe it wasn't in there the first time. It's stuff like that that makes me feel like the iPhone was kind of half-assed, as much as I love it.
Two-and-a-half weeks from iPhone OS 3.0, and we get this now? This app seems too little, too late.
If this were an all-in-one email solution, it might be tempting. But the thinly-written Privacy Policy and Terms of Use are definitely not a 'ringing endorsement' (as Bocachica put it) for Invisible Software, Inc.
TheStephenRay
Doesn't seem to work, anyway. I looked up my top two contacts; one of them only had two conversations shown although there's been half a dozen just in the last week, and the other didn't show up at all. Fail.
olliebean
Email search has been available to jailbreaks for quite some time. All 3.0 really is to put it bluntly is the collection of the ideas jailbreak authors were able to visualize and implement.
SukritiPhegeus