Label the different accounts on iPhone mail

Question

I've just finished setting up a mail address for my father. He has a custom domain name, and the he's able to receive/send email with this custom address via Gmail.

On his iPhone and iPad, he's using the default mail client, and it's linked to his Gmail account.

Since he receives emails from 2-3 different accounts already, it's confusing to know which mail was sent to which address.

In Gmail, you have the option to label the incoming messages, so you can quickly scan your emails and see exactly which were received from which address.

Is this option or any alternative available on the iPhone default mail client?

The labels are working if he uses the Gmail app, but he would rather keep using the default mail client.

Thank you for the help!

Answer 1

It's not evident in your question if you set up the different email accounts independently on his iOS devices or if they are linked in some other way –automatic forwarding for instance.

If you set them up independently, you can check each inbox separately if navigating through the shared inbox is confusing.

On top of the "All inboxes" view you can tap on "< Mailboxes"

and then choose which account inbox (or folder) you'd like to browse.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, you cannot label different accounts in Mail like in Gmail. On the other hand, when a new message is received and labeled in Gmail, this message is saved in a folder in Mail, having the same name of the label. Actually labels in Gmail become folders in OS X Mail. You can see those folders in the sidebar of the app. Obviously, it's not like having labels, I think that this is very annoying.

One thing you can do, to give your incoming messages a sort of "label" in Mail as well is to define a rule for your incoming emails. You may want to highlight with the same color all the mails belonging to the same account. To do so:

1. Preferences > Rules > Add rule
2. Set the rule you like. For example: if To your-email-account, then Set Color of the Message.
3. Click OK, then apply the rule to your previous emails, if you like, and it's done.

Of course is not like having labels, but at least you can recognise emails coming from different accounts by their background color.

Hope this can be useful ;-)

Answer 3

You can label the mailboxes in iOS. Just delete the email account in settings then accounts (or mail in iOS 10 and earlier). Once you delete it, re-add them then when it asks for the name of the account you choose the name of the account that you wish for it to have.

Let me know if you have any concerns/questions/issues.