Mail

The Shake to Undo feature on your iPhone can be extremely useful if you accidentally delete an email or want to undo something you’ve typed. However, it can also be irritating and unnecessary if you find yourself constantly prompted to erase things you don't want to. No problem; disable the feature in your Settings.

An interesting new feature of iOS 9 is auto email event suggestions for your Calendar. The software scans your emails to see if there are any events you haven't added to your schedule. This can be very helpful, especially if a lot of your emails contain pertinent events. However, if you find yourself with a cluttered calendar, you can easily turn off the automatic addition.

Everyone hates getting email spam. Sometimes it can be more than just annoying. Sometimes spammers can collect information from your device when the email is opened. If the email contains an image, it usually is downloaded from a remote server. When you open the email, it can tell spammers that you’ve opened it and can even show your approximate location. Pretty scary huh?

The nice thing about owning an iOS device is that it provides many opportunities to personalize your experience. The Mail app is no exception. Your default settings for left and right swipes in the Mail app let you quickly Flag, Trash, Reply, Forward, Mark as Unread, Move to Junk, Move Message, and Notify Me with the left swipe, or simply Mark as Unread with the right swipe.

In a previous tip, we covered how to Record Voice Memos. But once you've collected countless hours of playback on your phone, how do you share the recordings from there? Whether it's a recording of an interview, conference, or your beautiful singing voice, it's easy to share what you've recorded via email, AirDrop, or text message.

You may have had the experience of working on a draft of an email but then needing to look at a different email in your inbox. But the draft obscured the screen and couldn't be quickly pushed aside and then returned to. Fortunately, you can easily swipe away a draft, access your other email, and then quickly bring it back into view to continue working on it. This is typically referred to as "minimizing" the email draft.

Not all emails are created equal. Between spam and miscellaneous messages, there are a lot of emails we get notifications for that don't need to be checked right away. On the other hand, there are business emails and notes from family members we may want to reply to immediately. By turning on email notifications for only your VIP Mailbox in the Mail app, you'll receive fewer non-urgent notifications. Or, you can set a separate notification sound for your VIPs to differentiate between the two.

You probably already know you can call a phone number from within an email by tapping on the number. But did you know that you can also quickly add the phone number to Contacts as well?

You can easily mark, move, or delete an email in your iPhone's Mail app from within the body of an email using the menu at the bottom of your screen. You can also manage individual emails from within your inbox by swiping to the left over the email. But this is tedious and unnecessary if you have a large number of emails to deal with.

Do you often find yourself typing out phone numbers or addresses into a text when you need to share one contact's information with another contact? Well, you'll be happy to hear that there's a much easier way to share that information—and it doesn't involve copying and pasting or tediously typing it out. You can share contact details via text or email directly from the Contacts app:

When Autocorrect fails you or a message arrives that renders the lengthy epistle you just typed irrelevant, you can easily delete entire messages or emails. Or you can recover typing you accidentally deleted or an email your misfiled.

Previously, we covered creating keyboard shortcuts to help you quickly type commonly used phrases. Did you know you can also create shortcuts for emoji characters (those cute emoticons that go way beyond your average smiley face)? This is handy if you use a lot of emoji characters and don't want to switch back and forth between keyboards all the time.

With all of our information in "the cloud," it feels like we have everything at our fingertips. Emails, dates, calendar appointments, and phone numbers easily pop up on whatever device we're using and sometimes we take for granted how it all syncs up. Syncing your Google and Yahoo contacts with your phone is a super simple process and I'm going to walk you through it now. 

If you're like everyone else, you have a ton of email in your Inbox in Mail on your iPhone or iPad. And likely those are a mix of read and unread emails. If you're making a concerted effort to respond to all of them, you might find it convenient to just view those that are unread. Fortunately, in iOS 8 you can now edit the mailbox list so that you have a mailbox that just shows your unread emails.

Do you prefer to text in complete, grammatically correct sentences? Are you one of those people who know when you should use a comma versus when you should use a semicolon? Did you know that you can use Siri to punctuate your texts and emails like a pro?

In iOS 7, deleting individual emails from your inbox in the Mail app was a multi-step process. You had to swipe left on the email preview and then choose Delete from the options that appeared. It's much faster in iOS 8.

Stop checking your inbox every five minutes for that reply to the email you sent. Enable reply notifications instead so you receive an alert whenever a reply in an important email thread arrives.

If you're like me, you have been going about accessing your email drafts all wrong. Usually, I go to the All Mail option in the native Mail app to find my drafts folder and edit emails from there. 

Messages, emails, notes, reminders, there are so many ways to give your thumbs a workout while using an iPhone. Getting your iPhone typing up to speed can be a real time saver. Here are a few suggestions that will have you thumbing out messages speedily and with ease:

One of the great things about using an iPhone or iPad is that you can look up the definition of any word you encounter in Notes, Safari, Mail, and more with the Define feature. (See the tip on how to do that HERE.) But what if you are traveling or you speak more than one language and you want to be able to look up words in those languages as well?