How do you filter an email search (ie: Subject or From) in iOS 7?

just wanted to bump this post -- i thought something was wrong with my iphone settings. finally googled how to fix and ... can't . ***!! Need search by date functionality back ASAP please.

already posted feedback to apple too.

Does anyone have a solution? Are there any other email clients that will work?

The inability to show search results in date order makes the mail app very frustrating to use and has reduced my working efficiency dramatically!

There had to be some way to fix this!!

its driving me nuts, I simply cannot see why they would do this, its just not logical, I hope someone comes up with a soloution soon as my iphone that is used mainly for email is hardly worth the effort now, anyone got an alternativ mail app or a soloution?

I am using POP settings.. Maybe that is the common denominator.. I have not tried IMAP.

I have been looking for alternative client apps, but have not jumped yet. Does anyone have a firm recomendation?

shouldnt make any difference pop or IMAP, its just a protocol as far as I am aware, they just need to update email to do it like before, if you havent filed a complaint I would recommend you do it, the more people complain the more likely we are to get it sorted out,

shaunamc86 wrote:

Just figured it out and now I feel silly! All you have to do is search "From: name" or "subject: blahblahblah" Yay!

I'm not finding that this suggestion gives consistent results.

Yes, I'm glad you pointed that out. For me, the "subject:" command did nothing.

Even if it did, how is it an "upgrade" that we'd have to type 7 letters and a colon?

I agree with all: what a mess.

Just to be clear, I see 2 issues. First is that there's not a built-in filter system. The second, which is the original point of this thread, is that it doesn't sort results chronologically, and that doing so is not an option in Settings.

It relegates email to a toy rather than a business application.

smschultz wrote:

Yes, I'm glad you pointed that out. For me, the "subject:" command did nothing.

Even if it did, how is it an "upgrade" that we'd have to type 7 letters and a colon?

I agree with all: what a mess.

Just to be clear, I see 2 issues. First is that there's not a built-in filter system. The second, which is the original point of this thread, is that it doesn't sort results chronologically, and that doing so is not an option in Settings.

It relegates email to a toy rather than a business application.

I disagree with it not sorting chronologically. I think it does, but first it groups it into different categories of results. If you don't know that then it looks random. I'm not making excuses for it, just suggesting a way to help people interpret the results and (maybe) find what they want until this gets fixed.

pshute wrote:

I disagree with it not sorting chronologically. I think it does, but first it groups it into different categories of results. If you don't know that then it looks random. I'm not making excuses for it, just suggesting a way to help people interpret the results and (maybe) find what they want until this gets fixed.

Ah, interesting. Maybe so, but I honestly can't verify because in at least one of my test searches I truly can not divine the difference between categories and thus I don't know why the chronology restarts. The first few results have a little grey box that says FROM, so that's clear: it found my test string in the from line and gave them priority. Then it seems to be looking at the subject AND body and grouping those results (but no more grey boxes). Then the chronology starts over again and I am totally mystified why. The first one in this apparent new group (16th on the list overall and dating from this week!) has the search string in the TO line, but the next one, also recent, has it in the body only. These results don't seem to match the hierarchy you noted here. (note: This is searching only the "Current Mailbox"; no messages are flagged.) So, yes, chronology is clearly a factor and I would like to take advantage of the grouping in interpreting the results, but I'm still trying to figure it out.

By the way, I am on an Exchange server, so I don't know if any of my observations are unique to that environment. (i've now seen the threads on that.)

My sympathies to all who are struggling with this.

You really have to submit a complaint to Apple, there really doesn't seem to be any way around this whether it is typing subject or figuring out the catagories etc.

the more people that complain the more likely it will be fixed in an update, personally it has made nearly impossible for me to find the last email in a string of emails between the 4 people in my business that we all reply to all too, and there is no decent replacement app so please complain to Apple and hopefully they will put it all back to normal, no idea why they changed it in the first place, I have yet to see one person happy about the changes.

Plenty of people have submitted complaints with no result. I myself have also attended Apple Stores on three occasions (Liverpool, London Regent St and the huge one in Barcelona) to present the problem to 'gurus' who not only have no solution to offer but all claim to be unaware of it (a level of ignorance I find difficult to believe for people employed specfically to deal with queries allday long - surely its been raised by many more in store). To be fair Barcelona did suggest an 'on the fly' workaround that required unflagging emails since flagged emails were listed as a priority. I found a large number of flagged emails which suggests another problem since I rarely flag emails and certainly had not flagged the large numbers showing. Unflagging was a lengthy chore given the numbers and no 'unflag all' option. Whilst at fiorst it did seem to suggest a solution I still found emails out of chronological order.

Its pretty poor of Apple if they will only respond positively when the number of complaints reaches a certain figure.I guess the problem for the support team is that the techical management has given them no solution so everyone is being fobbed off. I am planning to issue a claim in the UK courts small claims track at moneyclaim.gov.uk. Once you do that you will be offered a free mediation.I think if lots of people did that ,especially in different jurisdictions, then it lands on their legal department desks rather than the support desks and maybe then management will be told some hard truths.

grossalert wrote:

Plenty of people have submitted complaints with no result. I myself have also attended Apple Stores on three occasions (Liverpool, London Regent St and the huge one in Barcelona) to present the problem to 'gurus' who not only have no solution to offer but all claim to be unaware of it (a level of ignorance I find difficult to believe for people employed specfically to deal with queries allday long - surely its been raised by many more in store). To be fair Barcelona did suggest an 'on the fly' workaround that required unflagging emails since flagged emails were listed as a priority. I found a large number of flagged emails which suggests another problem since I rarely flag emails and certainly had not flagged the large numbers showing. Unflagging was a lengthy chore given the numbers and no 'unflag all' option. Whilst at fiorst it did seem to suggest a solution I still found emails out of chronological order.

What I find even odder is that I haven't seen the issue mentioned in any of the blogs/reviews I've read for iOS 7. A few even raved about the great new search function. Either these people are lying, never use the search function, or don't have much email to search.

Perhaps we'd get Apple's attention if a few of us tracked down every blog and review that mentions the search function, and posted a comment saying there's a problem with it. Such people are always looking for things to talk about, so it might result in a few articles that reach a lot of people.

It's odd that there's a Flag All function, but no Unflag All. I hadn't noticed that.

Besides writing feedback, I did email Apple's CEO... but no such luck in getting an answer! Maybe more folks should write him!

Let me recap what I think is going on. With iOS 7, Apple seems bent on reducing all previous functionality to a minimum approaching sometimes idiocy. Here, I think they are trying to merge email search into Spotlight.

Email searching both for IMAP and Exchange Email Servers depends on server-side searching, ie., "IMAP4 provides a mechanism for a client to ask the server to search for messages meeting a variety of criteria. This mechanism avoids requiring clients to download every message in the mailbox in order to perform these searches."

In iOS 6, search criteria of "From", "To", "Subject" and "All" were implemented. The first three criteria operated on mail message headers only, the "All" criteria specified searching over the entire message... obviously, header-searches are a lot quicker (less load on the server) than full-message searches (a lot more load on the servers).

In iOS 6, one could specify how many messages to cache locally on your iOS device, min of 50, max of a 1000. When you went to search your email, first a local search was attempted... and this was of course very quick. You could then optionally, at one's own discretion, continue searching on the email server... this took longer of course. In practice, one could try caching on your device a day or two worth of email... over which most inmediate searching was done, and when one needed deeper searching then server-side searching would / could deliver further results from older email stored on the servers.

Both search-criteria as well as local vs server searching controls have been obliterated in iOS 7. Instead, the default is to to do full-body keyword searches over *all* available mailboxes (though one can limit it to a single mailbox)... kind of a brute-force approach, and this results on an equally brutal load on the email servers as well, read this for further details http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/09/17/ios-7-mail-app-uses-multi-folder-body-searche s-by-default/. Not only do they disregard the functionality of server-side searching but have now defined email searching as a very expensive operation in its overly use of network and server resources.

And then we come to the issue of how search results are ordered. Rather than delivering results in chronological order, results are reordered in classes (as in Spotlight): first From:, then To: and then who knows what... I think msg threading is involved as well! Leading to the situation that in searching for a msg one got this morning, one must endure a lengthy full-body search of all the msgs in the mailbox and in the end the particular msg one is looking for ends up being at the very bottom of an awfully long list of results... in many cases I simply can't find the matches I am after.

In short, it is a horrendous mess... and I can't believe Apple let this absurd implementation of email searching out the door. I am hanging on iOS 6 on my devices for the time being. To compound the issue, no other email clients seem to imolement server-side searching properly. I suppose many people use Gmail and the Gmail client... and are thus shielded from these problems. Gmail is an entirely separate universe. But for those who depend on our mail being hosted on IMAP4 and Exchange Servers the iOS 7 approach to searching is wrongly implemented... one would hope that this issue is being addressed on the forthcoming iOS v7.1 but I would't hold my breath. :-(

I tried today to submit a detailed feedback to Apple. But unhappily the feedback form limits how much text one can input. So I used Applecare Chat to talk to a rep and ask him to forward my comments as appropiate. The chat forms also limits how much text one can input, but fortunately they do allow uploading attachments. Apple is readying the iOS 7.1 update for nextvMarch, it seems... would be nice if they have addressed this problem with email searching inniOS 7!

delaroca wrote:

Apple is readying the iOS 7.1 update for nextvMarch, it seems... would be nice if they have addressed this problem with email searching inniOS 7!

I just read some reviews of the 7.1 betas, but none of them mentioned the searching problem. It would be great if somene with access to a beta version could test this.