Mail Tones from Electric Pocket is a nifty iPhone application that allows you to assign different ringtone alerts to each of the contacts in your address book. This way you’ll know who’s emailing you without ever having to turn the phone on.
Dan reviewed the application here, and I’ve been using it faithfully ever since. Since the iPhone lacks any sort of real repeating notification system, I rely on Mail Tones quite heavily. I know, from the sound of the alert, if an e-mail that’s arrived is important or not.
For the holiday season, Electric Pocket has released a Christmas version of Mail Tones, called Festive Tones.
Think of Festive Tones as Mail Tones little brother. Just like Mail Tones, the first step to using the application is to set up mail forwarding. Festive Tones relies on the iPhone’s push notifications service. To enable this you must forward a copy of your incoming mail to the Electric Pocket servers. G-Mail works best for this and it’s done quite easily.
The application contains several holiday tones which you can then assign to any of your address book contacts. Missing is support for domains or groups like Mail Tones though.
There are two types of alerts available. One group is a short alert type sound whereas the others are longer songs.
Personally, I really like both Mail Tones and Festive Tones. If you carry your iPhone in your pocket or purse it’s quite nice being alerting and knowing who’s e-mailing you without ever having to take out your phone.
Festive Tones is a cute addition to add to your iPhone for the holiday season. Once Christmas passes, you’ll probably want to upgrade to the full version of Mail Tones.
Download Festive Tones from the iTunes App Store.
M.S.R.P. – $1.99
What I like – Festive holiday sounds perfect for the Christmas season.
What I don’t like – No support for domain groups.