I use Gmail for my email accounts, and one of the best features of its web interface is the ability to search the entire catalog of your emails, content included. This is a powerful tool for finding old emails or looking up an address that someone emailed you a year ago.
Search is missing in the iPhone’s Mail app, but you can access Gmail’s search feature on the iPhone using the Mobile Safari browser. Simply launch Gmail.com in the iPhone’s browser, then scroll to the very bottom of the webapp until you see the search bar. You can then use all the power of Google search to find specific emails.
Gmail iPhone webapp search.
It took me a while to discover the search bar, as it’s not in a very intuitive position–it’s normally at the top of Gmail in a regular browser.
Of course, the Gmail webapp requires an Internet connection while the iPhone’s Mail app can download email to be read offline. But recent changes to HTML could soon mean that emails can, in fact, be downloaded in a browser and read offline. But until then, we’ll have to suffer with Mail and use Gmail’s web interface for searching.
