Appletell | Apple, Mac, iPhone, iPod | News, Rumors, Reviews, How-Tos

Apple has an odd habit of slipping unannounced changes into their updates, and sometimes those updates slip right past us, too. Such is the case with the iPhone’s Mail program. Although sending and receiving e-mail has always been a breeze, managing that e-mail has not. Everything pretty much gets dumped where it wants to get dumped, and bypassing that can be a headache, especially if your e-mail account falls outside Apple’s happy network (MobileMe, Gmail, etc.).

Setting up and managing accounts still isn’t as straightforward as it could be, but working with e-mails once they come in has seen a nice improvement. Before, you had to treat each e-mail as its own entity. If you wanted to delete a bunch, you had to do it one at time, or in one fell swoop. Not good if you had 30 e-mails in a folder and wanted to delete 29. But, if you haven’t checked your iPhone’s e-mail lately, do so now.

You’ll notice the “Edit” button on the upper right once you enter your account’s In Box. Tap that, and you’ll now see each e-mail in that folder has a radio button next to it. One by one, you can activate these buttons, then decide to either delete them or move them. Nearly perfect. The only thing preventing this from being truly useful is that, when moving them, you cannot create new destination folders; they have to go in folders that have already been set up outside of your iPhone.

These new capabilities may not seem like much on the surface, but they indicate Apple’s heading in the right direction. Once we have the ability to fully manage folders and accounts, and once all of the MobileMe push proglems are solved, who knows? I may no longer dread using my iPhone for e-mail communication.

Product [iPhone]