Mail Improvements

While we’re not sure yet that all of the rumours about updates to the Mail app will come true in iOS 13, we did see indications of at least some of them.

On-stage, Federighi mentioned that Mail will gain desktop-class text formatting controls, including support for rich fonts. From the screenshot shown, it looks like there will be a new Format panel that can be called up in the Mail app that will show buttons for bold, italic, underline, and even strikethrough, along with font selection, font size, bulleted and numbered lists, alignment, indentation, quote level, and more.

There is also what appears to be a Siri button there as well; this may simply be for dictation, but it’s possible that it could actually allow users to dictate formatting changes to Siri.

It also looks like the text-based “Send” button in the top-right corner has been replaced with an upward arrow, included in a more prominent header bar in the new message compose screen.

There were at least a couple of new Mail features that Apple didn’t talk about on stage as well. In the long list of iOS 13 changes shown at the end of the presentation, we noticed “Block sender in Mail” and “Mute thread in Mail” — both features that we’ve heard more recently were coming.

There is, however, no sign at this point of the rumoured “read later” queue or any features that would automatically filter incoming messages into separate categories.