Search your messages and send up to six photos
You can now search your inbox by keyword, send up to six photos in a single message, and see the line breaks you typed rendered the way you typed them.
Where you can get it
Three changes, and they do not all land in the same place. Searching your inbox is in the mobile app, in version 1.3.1. On iOS that is out now: update from the App Store. On Android, 1.3.1 is with our internal test team at the moment and goes to the public Play Store shortly. If you are on Android, the version you have carries on working normally in the meantime and Play will update you when it lands.
Six photos in a message and the text spacing change are in that release and on the web app, where they are already live. So Android users have those two on the web today, whichever app version they are running.
There is nothing to set up. No new settings, no switches, and nothing you have to turn on.
Search your inbox
Messages now opens with a search row: a search field, the Filters button, and the unopened button beside it. Type a word and press the search key on your keyboard, and the list narrows to matching threads. Tap the small cross in the field to clear it.
Search does not just look at listing titles. It matches the title, the other person's name, and the body of every message in the thread, not only the last one. Type two or more words and a thread has to contain all of them.
The Filters tray
The controls that used to sit above the list as a row of buttons have moved into Filters. The tray holds VIEW (INBOX or ARCHIVED, each with its unread count) and SORT BY DATE (NEWEST or OLDEST), with CLEAR ALL and SHOW MESSAGES at the bottom. The tray notes that unopened threads stay at the top whichever order you pick, so a message you have not read never falls to the bottom of a long list.
The unopened button stays out on the search row, next to
Filters, because it is a one tap filter people
flip constantly, and it carries a count of how many unopened
threads are left in what you are looking at. Under the search row,
a line tells you where you are and how much is showing, for
example Inbox · 12 of 40 threads.
Filtering your inbox is not new. Inbox, archive, unopened and date order were all there before, and they still are. What is new is finding a thread by what was actually said in it. If you remember a serial number, a courier ticket, a bank reference or a town, but not who you were talking to or which listing it was under, you can search for that instead of scrolling. Moving the mailbox and sort controls into the tray also gives the list back the space those buttons used.
Up to six photos in one message
Attach up to six photos and they send as one message. The composer
shows how many you have picked (for example 3/6), you
can add from more than one album before sending, and you can
remove a photo before it goes. You can send photos on their own,
with no text.
Photos arrive as a tiled block in a single bubble, and tapping any tile opens it full screen so you can swipe through the whole set. The recipient gets one notification, not one per photo.
If a photo fails to upload, nothing is sent. You will see Photos not sent, and your text and your photos are put back in the composer so you can try again once you are on a better connection.
Photos in messages are not new, but you could only send one per message. Six condition shots meant six separate messages, six notifications for the person on the other end, and a conversation pushed off the screen. A set of six now takes about as much room in the thread as one photo used to.
Line breaks are kept as you typed them
Text you write is now spaced the way you wrote it. Every line break you type starts a new paragraph with a gap above it, and blank lines you add for spacing are kept, up to five in a row.
This applies to listing descriptions, club, business and event descriptions, discussions, questions and answers, feature requests and messages, on both the web app and the mobile app, and the two now render the same.
Lines used to run flush against each other, so a description written as a tidy spec list read as a block of text. Keeping the writer's spacing means a list stays a list. The five line cap exists so a description that ends in fifty blank lines cannot push the questions below it a phone length down the page.
Worth knowing
- Six photos per message is a fixed limit, not a setting you choose. The picker only offers as many as you have room for.
- All or nothing. If any photo in a set fails to upload, the whole message is held back rather than sent with photos missing.
- Older app versions see the first photo only. Someone still on an earlier version will see one photo where you sent six, until they update.
- Search runs when you press the search key, not as you type.
- Search only looks in the mailbox you are in. With VIEW set to INBOX, archived threads are not searched. Switch VIEW to ARCHIVED to search those.
- Search is on the mobile app only for now. The web inbox keeps its inbox, archive, unopened and sort controls.
- Five blank lines in a row is the maximum kept. Anything beyond that is trimmed.
- Shortened text does not get the paragraph spacing. Where a description is clipped to a few lines, on a listing card for example, your line breaks are still there, but the paragraph gaps are not, because the preview has to count lines.
- Photos in messages stay private to the two people in the conversation, as they always have.
