The good news is that iOS's Mail keeps getting better. In iOS 4, the Mail app that significantly improved its utility. In , Apple has continued the trend by adding a number of features that users have been requesting. Here's a quick look at the major improvements.

Prior to iOS 5, messages you created in Mail were limited to plain text. In iOS 5, we finally get some basic formatting options, though it's not obvious where to find them. Select a word or a block of text, and a popover appears; tap the right-facing arrow at the end of the popover, and you get several new options. The button labeled BIU gives you three formatting options: Bold, Italic, and Underline. Tap one to apply it; you can apply multiple options--say, bold and italic--by tapping each. To dismiss the formatting options, just tap anywhere outside the menu.

Another welcome formatting option for outgoing messages is that you can now manually increase or decrease the quotation level--the number of indentations and quote-level indicators--for any line of text (where line means any block of text uninterrupted by a paragraph break, a carriage return, or a hard return). As with the aforementioned text-formatting options, this feature is a bit buried. Tap and hold or double-tap anywhere in the target text, and then tap the right-facing arrow in the popover that appears. Tap Quote Level and then tap Decrease or Increase as many times as is necessary to achieve the desired quote level. (Even if you've tapped or highlighted text in the middle of a line or paragraph, the quote level will be applied to the entire line or paragraph of text.)

If you prefer to never increase the quote level of existing text when you reply to or forward an email message, you'll appreciate the new Increase Quote Level setting, which you can disable in the Mail, Contacts, Calendars screen of the Settings app.