We designed Airmail to bring powerful email management tools to your fingertips. You can quickly save an email as a PDF to your favorite cloud storage, respond with a template message, or hide it until you can respond later. There’s even a way to automate multiple steps, and we call it Custom Actions.
Here are a few scenarios: let’s say you frequently forward emails to a coworker and then trash them. Or maybe you frequently respond to certain kinds of emails with a template message. Or maybe you mark web receipts as read, save a copy to a Dropbox folder, then archive.
Custom Actions in Airmail can turn all of these scenarios, and more, into a single tap.
Note: Because Custom Actions work differently on iOS and macOS, this post will focus on Custom Actions for iPad and iPhone. Stay tuned for our Mac post._
Get Started
It’s pretty easy to create a Custom Action in Airmail on iPad or iPhone. We have a few examples below to help get your gears turning, but here are the building blocks:
- In Airmail’s sidebar, go to Settings \> Custom Actions
- On that screen, tap Create
- Tap in the top text box to name your action
- Tap Add Actions
- Scroll through the list, tap an action to add it to your Custom Action
- Rinse, repeat a couple times
- If necessary, use Edit to reorder your actions
- Once you’re done, tap the back arrow to save your Custom Action
Some actions allow for extra input, like addressing to specific people, picking a folder, or adding template text.
Use your Custom Actions
When it’s time to take custom action on an email, you have a couple options. In the message list, you can:
- Swipe to the far left on any message for the Action List
- Scroll down to the bottom and choose your Custom Action
- Watch the magic happen
Or, if you’re viewing a message:
- Tap the (…) menu button in the upper left for the Action List
- Scroll to the bottom and choose your Custom Action
- Watch the magic happen
Example Actions
Here are a few examples of Custom Actions that some on the Airmail team use, or that we’ve heard from customers. Specific action names are **listed in bold** so to make them easy to find for your own Custom Actions:
- Archive and Save — An action that archives an email and saves a PDF copy to iCloud Drive. Actions: Mark as Read+ Move to (then pick a specific account and folder) + Save to iCloud Drive
- Custom Reply — These actions are uniquely powerful in that they allow you to create a full draft template, complete with adding any To, CC, and BCC addresses. You can customize the body text of your reply and automatically send it, or opt to have the chance to customize anything before it’s sent. This can do _wonders_ for responding to things like customer support FAQs, common website visitors questions, and more. Actions: Reply/Reply All/Forward
- Snooze and VIP — Use the Snooze action to hide a message for a specific time period, then Add Sender to VIP to get a notification if the sender emails you again
- Archive and Remind Me — Archive a message with Move to, then Send to Reminder to create a task in Apple Reminders to take action later
We hope those examples get your gears turning on how to manage your email even faster with Airmail and Custom Actions. We also have **one final bonus tip**: You can sync your Custom Actions between iPad and iPhone by going to Airmail’s Settings, then the iCloud Sync panel.
Thanks for using Airmail, and let us know what you think on Twitter [@Airmailer] or on Reddit at [r/Airmailreddit].
