So I finally updated my wife’s iPad mini 5th gen to iPadOS 26. I tend to delay this with her devices until I’m reasonably certain there isn’t a lot of adverse fallout from the update.
This time, as usual, I waited, made sure it was ok with her, and then updated her iPad. The first time she sat down with it and the new mail app to check her email, I started receiving texts about how unhappy she was with it. The long and the short of it is the list of emails down the left side doesn’t leave the screen when she selects a particular email to read.
For some reason, she reads emails with her iPad in Portrait, not landscape. Of course, this squeezes the email itself into a very narrow column on the screen, especially on the Mini.
Apparently, the 26.1 Release Candidate doesn’t address this with any changes.
Does anyone have any suggestions, ideas, funny anecdotes, etc. as this got ugly as I kind of got blamed for it. So there’s that.
I switched to the Google client when reading mail on my iPad Mini. I usually use the Mini in portrait mode, because I’m usually reading books on it, with an occasional side trip to mail. I agree with your wife, the email list on the left cannot be dismissed or swiped in or out at will. Don’t like it.
I don’t have an iPad mini, so I’m not certain that this works on the mini. But an easy solution is to invoke Stage Manager or Windowed Apps and then double-tap or long-press an email message. It will open it up in a separate window that you can close when you’re done reading or responding to it. The reason you need to invoke Stage Manager or Windowed Apps is so you can get the traffic lights. That way, you can close, minimize, or maximize the individual window as desired.
This drove me crazy too. Recently I discovered that if you tap twice on the message you want to read in the list it will expand to full screen and the list will go away. To go back you just tap on the list icon on the top left. I have an iPad Air but I assume it would be the same on a Mini.
