How To Handle Important Emails

It can be challenging to sort through all of our email to find the truly important ones. Junk mail, scams, phishing attempts, and more all contribute to overloaded inboxes. Luckily there are some easy ways to find and keep track of important emails.

VIPs

You can mark certain people as VIPs which lets you know when they send an email and makes it easy to find their emails. You can even have a special email alert sound for these senders.

To set up VIPs, start the Mail app and go to the Mailboxes list by tapping in the upper-left corner until you’re there:

Tap VIP and then tap Add VIP to add a contact to your VIP list:

Once you add someone to the list, you’ll see the VIP list where you can add more people or remove them:

VIP Alerts

VIPs can have a different alert sound from regular emails, which allows you to easily identify that an email has arrived from someone on the list.

In the VIP List, tap VIP Alerts and set the types of notifications you’d like, including the alert sound:

Show only VIP Emails

Once you have contacts added to your VIP list, it’s easy to show only emails from those people. From the Mailboxes list, just tap VIP:

To get back to all your emails, just tap Mailboxes at the top left, and choose your inbox.

Edit VIPs

To add to or remove from your VIP list, just tap the Info Button for VIPs in the Mailboxes list:

Tap either Add VIP or Edit in the upper right to add or remove people from your list.

Get Notified

Have you ever been waiting for a reply to an important email or wanted to know if an email arrives that’s part of an ongoing conversation? Instead of continually going to the Mail app to see if a new email has arrived, just ask to be notified about it.

While reading an email, tap the Flag button and choose Notify Me:

While writing an email, tap the Bell icon in the subject line and choose Notify Me:

If you’ve already sent an email and want to be notified of replies, go to your Sent folder, find the email and open it, then tap the Flag button and choose Notify Me, the same as shown above.

Once you’ve turned on notify me for an email, you’ll get an alert any time a related email arrives. To stop getting notifications, just follow the same steps as above, and choose Stop Notifying.

Flags

If you want to mark an email so that you remember it later, you can flag it, which will place a red flag or dot next to it.

While reading an email, tap the Flag button and choose Flag:

Flagged emails will show a red dot next to them:

To turn off the flag, follow the same steps, and choose Unflag.

Tip: to use a flag icon instead of the red dot, go to the Settings app, tap Mail, then tap Flag Style.

Show only Flagged Emails

To view only flagged emails, first enable the Flagged mailbox by going to the Mailboxes list, tapping Edit in the upper right, and enabling the Flagged mailbox. Tap Done when you’re finished:

You will now have a Flagged mailbox in your list. Tap on that to show only messages you’ve flagged:

Never Miss a Thing!

I use these features all the time to help with managing my email. Family members are listed as VIPs, and I often flag emails on my phone so that I can easily find them when I’m using my iPad. With these tips, I hope you never miss or lose an important email.

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