If you and the people you communicate with are fond of top-quoting (a.k.a., bottom-posting), where quoted material is placed at the top of the message and your reply is placed at the bottom, iOS 6 Mail helpfully collapses, accordion-style, much of the top-quoted text, making it easy to read the latest lines.

Finally, if you've got an email account that supports message archiving (Gmail, for example), you can now choose, on the fly, whether to archive or delete a message. While viewing a message, tap-hold the Delete button, and you'll get a popover menu listing options to Delete Message or Archive Message. Just tap your preference for this particular message.

Despite its long evolution, Mail still lacks some features you might like in an email client. Among the lingering gaps:

The good news is that with iOS 6, these remaining major feature requests feel more like gravy than meat: Though it still has limitations, Mail feels more like a full-featured email client. As I said of Mail in iOS 4, the app gets most of the basics right, and it excels at the most important tasks: viewing and composing messages, displaying attachments, and connecting reliably to nearly any e-mail server. In the two years since that statement, Mail has matured significantly, to the point where even power users can be satisfied.