One common question amongst iPhone users since the phone's first release was "How do I change the new mail tone?"  Although this somewhat natural feature was previously missing,  this option is finally available, beginning with iOS 5 (available for the iPhone 3GS and higher).  As we will see, users now have the option to set custom mail sent, mail received, and other notification sounds, using their choice of the iPhone's built-in ringtones, custom ringtone files (which can include custom notification tones, of course), or custom ringtones available for purchase from the iTunes store.

To get started, open the Settings app, and tap "Sounds"

Now, after scrolling a bit, you will see the different notification sounds which you can customize.  These include the New Voicemail alert, the New Mail alert, the Sent Mail alert, and more.

Selecting one of these alerts shows you the tones available to use in place of the default.

Select the sound that you would like to use, and you're all set!

At least several people have ended up at this blog because they were searching for a way to disable iMessage.  I recently warned about iMessage's fallback to SMS, with the end-point being that such a fallback should be disabled.  Some people wish to disable the use of iMessage completely.  I think that disabling iMessage entirely is a bit extreme, and while I haven't yet thought of a usage scenario to suggest that one stop using iMessage (feel free to comment below!), especially with the consideration that iMessage uses very small amounts of data and, in contrast, text messages are quite expensive, I will provide the instructions to disable it in this post.

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If you're a user of Open Web Analytics version 1.4.1, you may notice that if you try to set your report period to a custom date range, it instead shows you the statistics for "11/30/1999 - 11/30/1999".  From my reading, this should be fixed in version 1.5.0, but until that is released, we can backport the fix, provided here http://trac.openwebanalytics.com/changeset/1413 into 1.4.1.

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Update: I recently blogged about disabling iMessage.  To view that post, see: Disabling iMessage.

One important thing to remember when using Apple's iMessage in the recently-released iOS 5 is that, by default, your iPhone will fallback to SMS if the iMessage service is unavailable during a conversation with another iOS 5 user.  While this may not matter much if you're chatting with another iPhone user in your country and you both have text messaging plans, if you text message any iOS user in another country, I strongly recommend disabling this option.  Why?  Because if your conversation falls back to SMS, then you will be charged for that international text message by your operator, and the fees are generally quite heavy (generally about $0.25/message, depending on the operator).

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