The iPhone was launched without the capability to search emails. It took until iPhone OS 3.0 for this feature to be introduced. Unfortunately, the search feature is still limited to the headers (i.e. to, from, subject etc). You are not able to search the body of the messages (full-text search). This is a quite severe limitation, in particular for mobile business users.

reMail is an iPhone app that solves this. If reMail sounds familiar, it’s probably because they’re a Y-Combinator start-up and that they’ve been featured on TechCrunch. In the article on TechCrunch, the reMail Beta was criticized due to privacy concerns, as the version reviewed actually stored and processed the messages on reMail’s servers. In recent versions, this is no longer the case (as TechCrunch also pointed out in a follow-up article). This is fortunate, because I’m not sure how comfortable I would have been with all my emails sent to their servers (even if they back then claimed the data was safely stored).

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