I never regularly used an email client until 2007. Up until that point, web mail provided the best email experience for my personal email accounts, such as Gmail. I had used several clients in past, including Outlook, Eudora, Lotus Notes and OS X Mail; however, none of them felt easy to use or worth the hassle of set and configuration.

The iPhone changed my relationship with email profoundly: what was once an occasional communications tool suddenly became indispensable. The mobile web interface for Gmail and .Mac at the time was sub par, being optimized for a feature phone WAP browser or altogether non-existent. The Mail app included on the original iPhone removed all of the issues I had with a desktop email client and quickly became my preferred method for reading and composing an email.

The Mail app in iOS has improved quite a lot since 1.0, always proving itself as among the best mobile email clients available. There is, however, one behavior that draws my ire every time I send an email.

When sending an email, the list of suggested or recent recipients starts being shown immediately below when you begin typing in the ‘To:’ field. The intent for this auto-complete feature is to save you time from tapping in a whole address. My problem with this is the inconsistent results it provides. While there are dozens of addresses I have sent email to before, with many more in my contacts, there are two addresses I send more mail to than any other. By far. Why, then, do the auto-complete results change for a given letter? When I type the letter ‘a’, for example, why are the results not the same every time? What algorithm is determining the results and the order they are in?

To improve Mail on iOS, I would very much like to see a method for pinning or tagging an address to the top of the auto-complete list. Either that, or an improved auto-complete that delivers more intelligent, relevant and – above all else – consistent results.