What's new in Mail on iOS 27: better search for everyone, and Smart Reply and Ask Siri only with Apple IntelligenceWhat's new in Mail on iOS 27: better search for everyone, and Smart Reply and Ask Siri only with Apple Intelligence

Mail in iOS 27 has four main changes: rebuilt search, redesigned suggestions, a Smart Reply that writes in your style, and Siri AI inside the app.

Apple announced them at WWDC in June and they shipped with iOS 27 on 14 September. 9to5Mac republished its guide to them on 9 October. Only the first works on every iPhone that runs iOS 27; the other three depend on Apple Intelligence, and two of them on English. Apple's own iOS 27 page and two newsroom posts are the source for what each one does, with MacRumors' Mail guide for the requirements.

What changed in Mail search?

Apple says search in Spotlight, Photos and Mail was rebuilt in iOS 27, and that Mail has a completely new ranking system for its Top Hits, meant to bring the most relevant results to the top. Apple's 14 September announcement says the change applies on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Apple also lists faster message loading, more reliable search indexing, better list formatting and more accurate unread counts. None of this needs Apple Intelligence, and there is no setting to change.

Suggestions, Smart Reply and Ask Siri

Suggestions offer quick actions drawn from an email: directions in Maps, an event for Calendar, or shipment tracking in Wallet. In iOS 27 they have a new design and can hand off to third-party apps as well, with a menu when more than one app can act. Apple's page marks this as available in English, and MacRumors says English only at launch.

Smart Reply, the short replies Mail suggests at the bottom of a message, can now draw on a user's personal writing style, 9to5Mac says; Apple's own page describes the same idea for Write with Siri, which it says can match your writing style, punctuation and tone in Messages and Mail.

Siri AI adds Ask Siri throughout Mail. Per MacRumors, you press and hold an email to ask Siri to summarise it, track a package, or act on it, such as deleting everything from one sender, and can follow up by swiping down. Those conversations are kept in the Siri app.

Which iPhones get the Apple Intelligence features?

Apple Intelligence needs an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max or any iPhone 16 or later, and it needs about 14GB of free storage on the newest iPhones. Siri AI is in beta, in English to start, and Apple says it will not initially be available in the EU. MacRumors adds that it is not available in China either.

Our take

Mail in iOS 27 is two releases in one. For everyone, there is a search that ranks results better, and for most people that will be the change they actually notice, because finding an old email has been the weakest part of Mail for years. Apple has not said what the new ranking weighs, so the honest test is to search for something you know is there and see whether it comes first.

Everything else is an Apple Intelligence feature, and the conditions stack up quickly: a recent iPhone, free storage, the right language and, for Ask Siri, a country outside the EU and China. Siri AI also runs under daily usage limits Apple has barely published, which matters in an app where you might ask several questions an hour.

APPDOOK's view is that the suggestions are the quiet improvement worth watching. Letting a shipping email open the courier's own app, rather than only Apple's, is the kind of change that makes Mail useful to people who do not live inside Apple's apps. Its English-only start means most of the world will not see it yet, and for anyone outside that group the new search is the whole upgrade.