Customise iOS Mail with VIPs

Only receive the Mail notifications you care about

For many of us, email is an important means of communication, but our Mail inboxes tend to be much busier with newsletters, offers, spam and other noise than, say, our Messages or Phone apps are likely to receive.

You might be happy to get all these emails, but it can mean your phone gets a bit busy with notifications, and if you don’t tend to open them all immediately, there’s a chance you’ll miss an email from someone important in among the din. iOS includes a feature in the Mail app called VIP that can help here, though. Add contacts to your VIP list and you’ll have more flexible options for notifications just for them, and you even get a separate new inbox that pulls together just the emails from your VIPs.

VIPs are separate to your usual Favourite contacts, and when you add someone to your Favourites list you won’t simultaneously add them to your VIP list (or vice versa), so you’ll have to cultivate your selection of important emailers from new. But don’t worry – we’ll show you how to add new people to your VIP list from Mail or the Contacts app (as well as how to remove them), and how to make the most of the list once you’ve built it. Matt Bolton

Add contacts to your VIP list and you’ll have more flexible options for notifications