Drag and drop functionality for the iPhone has been around since at least iOS 11, but iOS 15 adds a new capability that makes it easier to find important emails when you need them.
I’m not a big fan of marking emails in Mail because the color assignment is as organized as it gets. You get seven different colors, but flagged emails from Gmail, Outlook, and other email services will only show up in red, even if they’re different colors on the services themselves.
One way to keep track of important emails that you will need to see again is to add them to notes or reminders. And in iOS 15 and later, Apple is making this process as easy as possible. Simply drag and drop an email to the desired note or list and it will appear as a beautiful link that you can click to return to the email when needed.
In fact, you could have added email links before in Reminders, but you’ll need to open the email and ask Siri to “remember this”and it will become a new thing on your default list. Drag and drop was first introduced in iOS 15 and allows you to select any list in Reminders. In addition, you can also add email links in Notes. You’ve been able to do this on the iPad since iPadOS 13, but it finally arrived in iOS 15 for iPhone.
Find a letter in the mail
Open Mail, then find the email you want to add to your note or list. You can only drag it from the list view of each mailbox, so if you have it open, go back to it in the list view.
Important: Drag and drop works from any mailbox, such as Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo, but you’ll need to have these services added to Mail on each of your devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac) if you plan to open email links. to them from synced notes or lists on those other devices. If you try to access email on another device that doesn’t have a mailbox account added to Mail, you’ll get an error.
Click and drag
Then tap an email from the list, quickly swipe to activate the drag and drop feature, and don’t let go. If a preview and quick actions menu appears, don’t worry because you can still swipe horizontally to collapse the preview back into a list view, with drag and drop ready to go.
Switch to another app
To add an email to Notes or Reminders, use the other hand to switch Mail to the appropriate application. You could:
- Swipe up from the bottom of the screen until you release towards the middle after a short pause (on Face ID models) or double-tap the Home button (on Touch ID models) to open the app switcher, then swipe to find Notes or Reminders and tap it.
- Swipe right or left at the bottom of the screen to scroll through recently used apps (on Face ID models) until you reach Notes or Reminders.
- Swipe up from the bottom of the screen (on Face ID models) or press the Home button once (on Touch ID models) to open the Home screen, then open Notes or Reminders from the Home page or App Library.
Drag the email wherever you want.
If you’re using Notes, open a new or old note, then drag the email link to wherever you want. It will appear as a simple hyperlink linking the email subject to the email itself in Mail. You can change the subject line text however you want. To open an email in Mail, tap the link.
When adding to reminders, open or create the list where you want to receive the email link, and then release it as a new item in the list. As a result, the subject of the letter will be added to the list, and the “Mail”icon will appear next to it. This Mail icon is a link to your email, so you can change the subject line text in the list any way you like.
How email drag and drop works in other apps
Now you can drag an email from Mail to any other app, like Bear (pictured below) and Things, and get a nice note-and-reminder-like hyperlink.
However, many apps, such as Google Keep (pictured below), do not convert the link into a hyperlinked subject line. The same applies if you are trying to add an email link as a reminder note. Instead, you’ll see a Link URL, which is just a URL scheme for Mail that opens the ID associated with the email locally. If the app supports it, you can manually create a hyperlink by adding text in the subject line.
It’s also worth mentioning that you can drag and drop notes into reminders and the note’s title will appear with a notes icon next to it. The text in the list can be changed, and clicking the Notes icon will open the note. If you try to drag a reminder into Notes, you will only get the text of the reminder, not a link to it.