Taking Some Time Off? Use This Guide to Write an Effective Out-of-Office Message
Avoid Mail Quotas, Improve Performance, and Reduce Clutter By Archiving Your Damn Email
Now You Can Decide: How-To Choose Your Preferred Default Web Browser and Email App in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14
What to Do If You Run Low on iCloud Storage Space
What to Put at the End of Your Email Messages
Be Careful in iOS 13’s Mail App—the Trash Button Is Where Reply Used to Be!
Be Careful in iOS 13’s Mail App—the Trash Button Is Where Reply Used to Be!
For unknown reasons, Apple redesigned the toolbar in the iOS 13 version of Mail. Such things happen, but this time, Apple made a big mistake and moved Mail’s Trash button to where its Reply button used to be. Lots of people who have become accustomed to tapping Reply are now finding themselves deleting messages inadvertently, since a tap in the same location in iOS 13 deletes the message. It’s hard to retrain muscle memory—the ability to reproduce a particular movement without conscious thought—but if you find yourself deleting messages accidentally, you’ll need to slow down and remember to tap the new location of the Reply button.
(Featured image by Skitterphoto from Pexels)
More tips to make the most of your iOS devices.
- iPhone Not Charging Reliably? Clean Its Lightning Port with a Toothpick
- Did You Know You Can Drag the Scroll Bar in iOS 13?
- Some of Our Favorite Features of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13
- The Fastest Way to Change Wi-Fi Networks in iOS 13
- Everything you need to know about Multi-Tasking in iPadOS 13
Choose between Archiving and Deleting Messages in iOS Mail
When you’re viewing a message in Mail on an iPhone or iPad, you get five buttons: Flag, Move, Archive or Delete, Reply/Forward/Print, and New Message. But what determines whether that third button is Archive or Delete? iOS hides that option in Settings > Passwords & Accounts > YourEmailAccount—the details then vary by account type before you see the Move Discarded Messages Into options.
- iCloud as your primary address: Mail (under Advanced) > Advanced
- iCloud as a secondary address: Account > Mail > Advanced
- Gmail or other email provider: Account > Advanced
But what if you want to archive a message when you have Deleted Mailbox selected, or vice versa? Simply tap and hold on the Archive or Delete icon, and a popover appears, giving you both choices.
Don’t Use Rules in Apple’s Mail to Send “Out of Office” Replies
It’s helpful to unplug occasionally and ignore email while on vacation or otherwise away from your work routine. And it’s a good idea to set up a vacation auto-responder to tell correspondents what to do in your absence. It might be tempting to create such an auto-reply with a rule in Mail on the Mac, but resist the temptation! It’s way too easy to end up sending replies to every message from a mailing list or to addresses that will themselves reply back, causing a mail loop where each message generates another reply, ad infinitum. Instead, always set up such auto-responders in the server settings for your email provider, which are better about avoiding mail loops. Here are instructions for Gmail, iCloud, Outlook.com, Spectrum, Xfinity/Comcast, and Yahoo. If you use a different email provider, the instructions will likely be similar; check with your provider for details.