Customize Your iPhone’s Mailbox List

A customized Mailbox list makes using Mail on your iPhone (or iPad) easier and faster. You want to know this stuff!

When working with Mail on an iPhone (or an iPad) you often need to switch to a different mailbox. You’ve probably switched from the an Inbox to a Sent Messages maibox, or to a mailbox where you’ve filed some mail messages away, or to the special one called All Inboxes.

Switching mailboxes means tapping the Mailboxes button at top left, and then choosing a mailbox from the list. The mailboxes in the top section are “Favorites” and they’re the ones that are easiest to get to. You can specify which mailboxes go into the Favorites section–and that’s what we’re going to learn to do here. (Other mailboxes are always available, even though they aren’t in the Favorites section; they just take longer to get to. The Favorites are easier to access, and faster to switch to, so we want to put our most-used mailboxes there.)

Note: I keep saying “Mailboxes” because that’s what Apple calls them. Many people think of them as “folders” (I’m one of those people). But I’ll use Apple’s lingo here.

Can’t think of a mailbox you’d like to have quick access to? How about a mailbox just like All Inboxes, except for sent messages? If you have more than one email account this is very handy, as it means you can see a list of every sent message, regardless of the account you used, all in one place. Just like All Inboxes, except it shows sent messages. Such a mailbox exists, but Apple doesn’t have it activated in the Favorites section. We’re doing to take care of that ourselves, right now.

How to customize the list of Favorite mailboxes in the iOS Mail app

Launch Mail on your iPhone (or iPad). Tap Mailboxes at top left, then tap Edit (top right). Your iPhone’s screen will look a little different than mine because yours will show your accounts, not mine.

Tapping the Edit button gives you a bigger list of mailboxes, some with a checkmark, some without. See below. Find the “All Sent” mailbox and check it. While you’re in there, you might want to uncheck mailboxes you don’t use, reducing visual clutter.

Personally, I don’t have a need to see the inboxes for my various email accounts individually, so I’ll uncheck those. I’ll still receive mail from those accounts, and I’ll still see every message from every account in the All Inboxes mailbox.

Check any other mailbox that you’d like to be able to quickly switch to via the mailbox list. Note: this list is only “Favorites.” It does not include every mailbox you might have— the ones you’ve made, for example. We will address those shortly.

While you’re in the Edit mode you can use the horizontal handles at the right of each mailbox to drag them up or down in the list. Reorder the mailboxes to suit your preferences; there’s no right or wrong here.

When you’re done, tap the Done button at top right. Here’s how mine looks. Nice and clean.

Note: even if you unchecked everything except for All Inboxes you could still tap the Mailboxes button and then tap any account (shown in gray under the Favorites) and then scroll down and choose view any mailbox you want to view. But that’s the slow way. What we’re doing here is giving ourselves quick, one-tap access to the mailboxes we need most often.

If you’re only interested in checking and unchecking the various Favorites options that Apple provides, you’re all set, nothing else to do. But if you want quick access to one of your own mailboxes— maybe one that you’ve filed a lot of stuff in– you need to do something else. Here we go:

How to add your own folders to the Favorites section in iOS Mail

Let’s get back to where we were. In the Mail app tap Mailboxes at top left, tap Edit at top right. Now scroll down until you see Add Mailbox… Tap that.

When you tap Add Mailbox... you see the full list of folders (I mean “mailboxes”) for all of your Mail accounts. Scroll around and put a checkmark next to the mailboxes you want to add to Mail’s Favorites list. Here I’ve added two (and a third one further down, which you can’t see):

When you’re finished, tap Done. Here’s how my list looks now.

Now, when I’m in Mail, I can very quickly switch between the folders I care about the most. I mean the mailboxes. 😃 This saves a lot of time. You should try it.

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