The iPhone’s included mail client reminds of the device’s method of reading RSS Feeds. It just reads your mail, it won’t do much more than that and is a step down in my opinion. And now my review of the iPhone part 5 out of 6: Mail.

Set Up

On The iPhone
Setting up your mail accounts on the iPhone is ridiculously easy and a lot more intuitive than OS X’s bundled mail program. Instead of entering in cryptic server information, configuring how your mail is sent or received you will be presented with with 4 major mail services: Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, .mac and AOL. All that is required is your email address, password and name then you’ll be good to go.

If you don’t use any of these services then set up is still straightforward but there is an absence of a set up wizard.

On Your Mac
Chances are you most likely got your mail accounts set up on your Mac as well. You will not need to set up these accounts again as they can be synced over easily through iTunes but your messages are not. You can choose which accounts hop on over and which do not and can be selected in a matter of seconds.

Reading Your Mail

Preview
Previewing your message is a great part of the iPhone as you really can’t navigate through messages as well as you could in other desktop versions. Basically the mail structure is set up in a pseudo column view, you select but not flick through your account then mailbox to get to what you want and are displayed the column you are currently on.

In addition, once you select a mailbox you can see the first few lines (which can be customized in the Settings Widget) of the message to give you a heads up of what that message is about. You can also view who sent it, when it was sent and the subject line.

Full Message
If you display the message in full its no different than viewing it on regular Mail under OS X. Everything is displayed the same without any formatting problems. Links once clicked will automatically take into Safari.

Attachments
Wanting to try out the attachments feature I tried it out for myself. First when dealing with tacked on files whether it be Word or just a regular picture file, load times times will be extremely slow even on Wi-Fi and EDGE is much worse. I emailed off a 900 KB, 2500 x 1600 image to my iPhone (the new Leopard wallpaper) and it took a full minute to load the entire picture but after that it took under 10 seconds. That was on my Gmail account, my other mail account didn’t even display the entire image and no matter how much I tried it still would not go.

Now if you want to send attachments it’s pictures only and has to be done from within the photo Application. If you do recieve a picture there is no way to save it into your library, Mail is your only means of archiving.

Final Word
Overall Mail on the iPhone is ok, definitely not great and needs some work if its to be taken seriously. First off, there is no spam filtering. A HUGE knock already on the Application and there is no way to sort messages, no rules, no smart folder no nothing. There is no mass delete options and no way to save pictures into the Photo App. Signatures are limited to one and cannot be changed to a different one that has already been created. Mail has quite a ways to go before I can consider it a serious Application.

Part 6 and the final part of this review will be an initial wrap up.