In iOS 5 with Notification Center, there was finally the ability to get push notifications for all emails that came in through the official Mail app. There was just one problem, not every email is necessarily all that important to make one’s phone go buzzing all willy-nilly.

Thankfully, that’s what the VIP feature in iOS 6 is designed to alleviate. It’s possible to get a push notification when certain people send emails. Setting it up is easy.

Open up Mail. Go to the Mailboxes screen, by tapping the upper left arrow until it disappears. Then tap on VIP. If a VIP has already been set up, then tap the blue arrow on the right. This will open up the VIP list. Tap Add VIP… to set up a contact as a VIP. Only people with email addresses will be selectable as VIPs. Note that as of iOS 6.0, all of a contact’s email addresses are added as a VIP, so separate contact cards will need to be set up for a person in order to not have certain emails show up in VIP.

The VIP inbox should now be selectable from the Inboxes section of Mail, below All Inboxes. This inbox includes all recent email from VIPs, from all accounts.

The beauty of VIP email is that it exists as a different set of rules in Notification Center, so there’s no need to enable all notifications for Mail, or only certain ones like sounds can be enabled while VIPs will appear as a banner. These can be configured from the VIP List screen by tapping VIP Alerts, or by going to Settings -> Notifications -> Mail -> VIP. VIPs can be configured to appear as alerts, and everyone else as banners. Look at them up and their emails up there in that tiny banner. They’re like ants from up here. VIP emails will show in Notification Center with a star to to differentiate from non-VIP email notifications.

There’s a drawback for Gmail users looking to take advantage of VIP notifications: as built-in Gmail support is still Fetch-only, this means that true Push will only work through Gmail accounts set up as Exchange accounts.

Has the VIP inbox helped tame the email beast? Let us know in the comments?

Junk mail. Yuck. Not only is it annoying, it’s also a terrible waste. All those circulars about sales no one cares about involving products nobody wants… At least those unsolicited emails from Nigerian princes don’t waste any paper. Well now there’s this neat little app that will theoretically put a stop to most of these unwanted advertisements.

PaperKarma is so simple in its execution it almost sounds like magic. All a user has to do is snap a photo with their iOS device’s camera and the app will (read: should) find the company responsible and take care of the rest. The rest referring to getting users off of the mailing list. It’s a mind-bogglingly simple concept, really.

Anyone with an iOS device and a thinning patience for junk mail should definitely check out PaperKarma. It’s on the App Store right now, and it’s on sale for free for a “limited time.” What’s the harm in giving it a try, right?

FREE!

PaperKarma

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2012-01-20 :: Category: Lifestyle

Having an iPhone on you is always handy when you want to snapshot something you need to remember, whether it’s a for sale sign, promotional poster or an advertisement. One of the drawbacks of this process is that once you’ve taken the photo you’ll need to fish it out of your Camera Roll where it’s taking up valuable space among your actual photos and there’s also a good chance that you’ll forget about it altogether.

QuickShot! aims to put an end to these issues by combining your iPhone’s Camera and Mail apps into one slick process. Once the app is setup you can simply launch it, take your photo and push a button to send yourself an email. The process is simple enough that it can take as little as three taps to complete.By default the image isn’t saved to your Camera Roll either so you won’t have to worry about clutter anymore. When sending the email, you can customize it as you wish and also scale the picture before you send. This strikes us as one of those apps you think you wont need until, of course, you actually do and is certainly worth a look. QuickShot! is available on the App Store for $0.99.

$0.99

QuickShot!

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2010-05-06 :: Category: Productivity