[Review] Add More Configurations to Your iOS Email Experience

With Mail Enhancer you can do more with your emails in iOS.

Apple tries hard to make their iOS platform the best that there is, but one place where it is still pretty weak in features is email. iOS has a very clean email interface and it's very pleasant to use, but it lacks to much and that makes many users revert to using third party email clients like Gmail. If you're a heavy email user and you have an iOS device, you should check out a nice tweak in Cydia that has been dubbed Mail Enhancer by the developer Stefan Möllenkamp. I'll be the first to tell you that a lot of time was spent on this tweak and the settings contained within are very useful and enlightening.


Mail Enhancer begins with a respring of the device after installation and you'll notice two things: 1. you have a new icon on your SpringBoard (pictured above); 2. you have a new Settings.app cell which is labeled Mail Enhancer. You can open either of the two and you'll find an ultra long list of customizable settings. I swear that you'll never go back after trying this tweak - you'll feel like Apple only gave you a piece of bread and a cup of water; Stefan gives you prime rib and a beer. You can see the settings below:

To start, you have signatures. In Apple's Mail settings, you only have the ability to have one signature (how boring). Mail Enhancer lets you add a signature each for forwarding, composing, and replying to emails. Additionally, you customize each of those three instances with every single solitary email account that you cram into your iDevice. So if you have three different email accounts set up on your iDevice, you can have up to nine different signatures. This is great if you want to keep your work email professional and your personal email more casual. Mail Enhancer even supports HTML for your signatures.

Beyond simple signatures - Mail Enhancer brings HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to the iOS Mail application. This means that you can type in HTML code and it will auto-translate into what you're coding (if you have the Autoreplace option turned on). This is great if you're trying to make your email stand out; you can use boldface font, italics, make row and column tables, or organize your information in ways that you can't simply by writing paragraphs the way that Apple only allows you to do.

One of the bigger features of this tweak has to do with notifications. With Mail Enhancer, you can customize the way you're notified about emails. You can set priority types for all of your individual mail accounts - for example, make your work email a high priority account and your casual email a low priority account. Additionally, you can set up individual notifications for each email; you can set your work email to vibrate three times each time you get a new message and you can set your casual email to vibrate just once - this way you'll know the difference between which email you get a new message in even when the phone is on your pocket. You can use anywhere between one to five vibrations per mailbox and you can set the priority to either high or low. Aside from vibrations, you can change the noise you hear too. You can use the default ding noise or you can import and use any iTunes ringtone to play when you get a new email. You can even set Mail Enhancer up to speak your email notifications similarly to the way that CallTell speaks your text messages.

With Mail Enhancer you also have the ability to change how your email senders' names appear. You can have them appear the way you have them in your Contacts application or you can change it so that it says, "Mom/Dad" instead of a first and last name. You can display just their email address instead of a name - or make it show only the first or only the last name and not both.

If you're sleeping and you don't want to hear any notifications from email, you have the option to toggle on Quiet Hours, which will suppress notifications from the Mail application until the time that you designate. You can choose when Quiet hours starts and when it ends and in the end you can sleep a quiet night, or you can work or be in class in utter silence. You can even change your notification languages.

Up next we have highlighting which lets you set different colors for each email account in your Mail application. This will help you determine which email account your new message is associated with - you can make each account whatever color you want. There's even a message filtering feature that lets you filter you inbox by new, unread, or flagged messages to help you discern what's important and what's not.

All in all, this tweak is a 100% improvement from the stock Mail application that Apple hands to you. I recommend this tweak to all email power-users and anyone who wants to be able to do more with their Mail application. It's fully compatible with iOS 4 and iOS 5. Below is a video demonstration by the developer: