Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋
Welcome to Issue #257 of All About Email!
Last week, I dug into a stat from Litmus and Validity about AI adoption and accessibility. It sounds encouraging. But I think we need to be careful about what we take from it.
This week, Apple has shipped iOS 27. The change I want to focus on is how Mail helps people find an email after it’s disappeared down their inbox.
🤔 We spend a lot of time wondering whether subscribers will open our emails. How much time do we spend thinking about whether they can find them again?
Let’s go! 👇
Ever Wondered How That Newsletter Was Made?
You know those emails that land in your inbox and make you think, “Okay… how did they do that?”
With Email Detective, you can sneak a peek ;)
The free Chrome extension shows you which email marketing platform sent an email, along with technical details like the HTML builder they used and authentication details, right from Gmail or Outlook.
So next time you come across an email you love, investigate it.
You might pick up a few ideas of your own.
What Actually Changed in Apple Mail?
iOS 27 was released on Monday, 14 September, with eight new features.
🚨 Apple describes a new Mail search ranking system designed to bring the most relevant results to the top, including messages buried deeper in your inbox.
That doesn’t tell us exactly how the ranking works, or mean keywords and recency have stopped mattering.
MacRumors gives an example: someone searching for a retailer to find an order may see the order confirmation above promotional emails from the same business.
That makes sense for someone looking for their order. It isn’t evidence that marketing emails are being pushed down across every search.
There are other changes, too.
Depending on your device and feature availability, Siri can help with messages, contextual suggestions offer quick actions, and Call Context can surface useful information from an email when you ring a business.
💡 But search is the bit I’d pay attention to as a sender.
Why Does Search Matter?
People already revisit emails. Booking confirmations, useful newsletters, discount codes they vaguely remember receiving.
Better search could make that easier, and I’ve already discovered something very interesting with Gmail’s AI search.
Which raises a few practical questions. 👇
1) Does Your Email Still Make Sense Later?
🤷♂️ Maybe not all emails have to make sense later, but let’s consider this example:
Someone searching for a workshop in November might find your September email.
Will they immediately understand when it took place? Is the booking link still useful? Does the landing page explain that it has finished?
2) Are Your Important Details in Live Text?
Dates, prices, booking references and venue names shouldn’t exist only inside an image.
Movable Ink says Call Context reads live text first and can use optical character recognition to extract text from images. That’s a claim about Call Context, though, not proof of how Mail search indexes image content.
I wouldn’t assume images are invisible. I also wouldn’t rely on image recognition to make essential information usable.
🚨 This connects with Issue #244, where we looked at writing for AI summaries, and our earlier accessibility discussion in Issue #241.
✅ Making information easier to read remains useful, whatever happens to search.
What Don’t We Know Yet?
🤔 What I’d like to know is whether subscribers will use the improved search to revisit our emails.
Will they find an offer they’d forgotten about or a newsletter they meant to read?
And will that lead to a click, a booking or a purchase?
That’s the bit we can’t judge from Apple’s examples.
I also wouldn’t give templates a blanket “all-clear”.
💡 Apple says the new search brings more relevant results to the top, but I haven’t found a detailed explanation of how it ranks them.
For now, that leaves us without much basis for claiming that a particular subject line or content change will improve your position in search.
Your Subscribers Won’t All See the Same Thing
MacRumors reports that the search improvements are available on iPhones running iOS 27, while the AI features require compatible hardware (sadly, my iPad can’t run them🥺).
It also reports that Siri AI isn’t available in the EU or China at launch. Apple lists contextual suggestions as English-only.
🤔 If you send to a mixed UK and EU list, device, language, location and settings can all affect the experience.
So these changes are coming to everyone’s Apple Mail app.
What You Can Actually Do
✅ Five practical checks you can do now:
1) Search for Your Own Emails
In an Apple Mail test inbox running iOS 27, try finding your last three campaigns using what a subscriber might remember.
Your results won’t predict everyone else’s, but they can highlight unclear wording.
2) Be Descriptive
Give subject lines, preview text, and body copy enough context to explain the topic.
You can still be interesting without making readers guess.
3) Use Live Text for Essential Details
Dates, prices, codes, reference numbers and locations should be readable without relying on an image.
4) Check Campaigns and Automated Emails for Staleness
Use explicit deadlines, including the year where helpful.
Make sure linked pages explain current availability or what to do when an offer has ended.
5) Test Your Templates
Send yourself a test of each main email template you use, then open them in the latest version of Apple Mail.
Can you read the important details with images turned off?
Does dark mode leave everything legible?
Are buttons easy to tap, and do links take you where you expect them to?
💡 Test the emails your subscribers actually receive, not just the preview in your email platform.
Before You Go
Apple has changed Mail’s search ranking. What that means for your campaigns is still something you need to observe.
💡 However, you don’t need to wait for that evidence to make dates clearer, keep important details in live text or fix an unhelpful landing page.
🤔 Try finding one of your own campaigns in a test inbox using only what you remember about its content.
Could you find it?
And did it still make sense when you opened it?
Hit reply, {{first_name|friend}}. I’d love to know what you find.
Quiz Time!
This week, I’m testing out a new feature called “Quiz Time” so you can see what you learned in this week’s email.
The quiz will open in a new window when you choose the first answer. Have fun! 🤩
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That’s it for this week. 👋
Simon
All About Email - Playlist 🎧
Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.
Sponsorship Opportunities
🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.
Email Marketing News & Tips
This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:
What’s Your Inbox Persona? - New Yahoo Mail Research Reveals Four Inbox Management Styles. (Yahoo)
Growth - How to Convert Readers to Your Newsletter Through Events. (Inbox Collective)
Five Year Ticket Fixed - Gmail app dark mode update. (Email Markup Consortium)
Clean the risk - Email List Cleaning That Protects Your Inbox Revenue. (Bento)
In Concept - The story behind Envelope Accessibility™. (Paul Airy)
A Turning Tide? - Gambling with cold email. (Laura Atkins)
👀 I Cannot Wait!! - timewaster. (Jack Ellis)
Version 2.0 - M3AAWG Best Practices for Sending Legally Mandated
Emails to Large Audiences. (M3AAWG)
Dangling DNS CNAMEs - How DMARC Helps Detect Organised SPF Abuse Schemes. (dmarcian)
The new trust problem - Generative AI in cybersecurity. (Valimail)
If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
I hope you have a great week! 👋
