How to build app for flagging emails in iPhone?

Unfortunately, the iPhone cannot flag email m开发者_StackOverflowessages for followups as it does in Outlook or Gmail. Everywhere I search, people are griping about this with no solution except for moving emails in a 'follow up folder', which is lame because I use flags on my PC with great ease. I am using Exchange to access my email and know flagging works on Windows, Treo, and some other phones. Still no email flagging in the upcoming iOS 4.3 either.

My question is if it is possible to modify the built in mail app in iPhone to give capability for flagging email messages? I'm sure this would require jailbreaking which I'm ok with. If it is not possible, what about creating a stand alone app that simply views emails with an option to flag them? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The only options you have to get this feature are

• build your own mail client for the iPhone. There is a really nice (but not up-to-date) mail framework in Objective-c called MailCore and a pretty good C framework called libEtPan
• hope that Apple will support it in a new iOS version release

Have a look at the sql database for the MobileMail.app account in this folder:

/User/Library/Mail/IMAP-emailaddress@imapserver/

Edit it directly with SQLite.

The iPhone's mail application doesn't come with an extensions framework, so there's no straightforward way to modify its functionality. If you really have your heart set on this feature, the only option you really have is to jailbreak and write your own mail client. That wouldn't be a simple exercise, especially if you need Microsoft Exchange integration.

The way I would deal with this is to use the Gmail web interface, which lets you star messages. You can set up your exchange account to forward messages to Gmail, and then you'd use Gmail as your primary mail provider.

Both these solutions sound really clumsy, so I think you might have to give up on flagging messages.