Thursday, July 2, 2009

GTD tip: how to take advantage of searching emails with MobileMe on iPhone

One of the most exciting new features for iPhone users is the ability to search your MobileMe email account.


Limitations - the fine print
From my testing and what I can tell, here's what exactly can be done:
  • if you do a search and you can't find something, you will be given the option to search on the mail servers for MobileMe
  • however, the search is only confined to that folder.
  • Spotlight search seems to be able to search across all folders, but doesn't look like it's capable of doing searches on MobileMe server.

What does this mean? Fewer folders = better!
If you organize your email in a lot of subfolders, this search feature isn't that useful. The trick is to just have a few folders - for example, if you don't categorize at all, you might have an inbox and an archive. Or you might just put everything in your inbox, then everything is searchable.

Personally, I have 3 folders in addition to my inbox.
  • Archives
  • Waiting for
  • Useful

Since I keep all my mail on MobileMe, I'm loving this feature! Can't wait for the iDisk app now.



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