Use Mail in iOS 7 - Take Control of Apple Mail (1.0) - page 119

• Fixed sort order: In Mavericks Mail, I like to see my messages with the oldest
at the top and newest at the bottom. (That's the way English works—we write
from top to bottom—so I expect older information to be above newer informa-
tion.) But in iOS Mail, you can't change the sort order; messages are always ar-
ranged with the newest at the top.
A similar restriction applies to mailboxes themselves. iOS 7 always displays the
mailboxes within each account in alphabetical order, and you can't rearrange
them. (The sole exception is mailboxes in the top-level view, which you can turn
on or off and drag up or down in the list—see Mail Changes in iOS 7 . )
• No collapsible mailboxes: In Mavericks Mail, you can create mailboxes in-
side mailboxes inside mailboxes—to whatever depth and complexity suits you.
When using an IMAP or Exchange server, all those nested mailboxes appear in
the Mail app just fine. But Mail in iOS 7 has no way of collapsing a hierarchical
list to hide the items in it—there's no disclosure triangle or plus/minus icon that
means show/hide or collapse/expand. So, if you have 5 top-level mailboxes with
20 sub-mailboxes in each one, Mail shows you a single long list of 105 mailboxes.
Sub-mailboxes are indented to show their position in the hierarchy, but there's
no way to hide them. Since (per the last point) mailboxes always appear in al-
phabetical order within any group and can't be rearranged, if you file one mes-
sage in the Apple mailbox, and the next one in the Zoo mailbox, get ready for a
lot of scrolling!
By reducing your overall number of mailboxes (see Optimize Your Mailboxes )
and renaming your most frequently used mailboxes so they appear first in an al-
phabetical list, you can reduce the amount of scrolling you must endure.
• S/MIME but no PGP/GnuPG: You may be surprised to learn that the iOS 7
version of Mail supports encryption and digital signatures using S/MIME, just
as the Mavericks version does (see Sign and Encrypt Messages ), although the
setup process is different (see Sign and Encrypt Messages in iOS 7 ) . Because
Mail doesn't support plug-ins, you can't use PGP/GnuPG or other encryption
methods—but you are free to use an entirely different app, such as oPenGP , if
you need PGP/GnuPG.
12 Things Every iOS Mail User Should Know
If you want to get the most out of iOS 7 Mail, you should be aware of some configuration and
usage options that may not be immediately apparent. Of the many things Mail can do, I focus
here on the 12 that I think are most essential.