Take Control of Mail on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch

Optimize Your Mailboxes

As I mentioned earlier in Collapsible Hierarchical Mailboxes, Mail on the iPhone OS doesn't deal gracefully with large numbers of mailboxes, especially if they're nested several levels deep. The more mailboxes you have, the more scrolling you must do to find or file messages, and you can't avoid the scrolling by rearranging your list of mailboxes from your desktop email client or a Web client, because Mail always displays mailboxes (at any particular level of hierarchy) alphabetically. And, when you're searching within the Mail app (as opposed to using the system-wide Spotlight search), Mail searches only the mailbox you're in when you initiate the search. From a certain point of view, then, having as few mailboxes as possible ...