Access iPhone Mail inbox using native app. Possible?

Question

I was asked to write a native iPhone to provide a filtered view of items in the Mail InBox. For instance, I may want to list out only the emails with text "Mac Tablet Gossip" inside the mail content. However, I don't need (or want) to access the inbox of the mail account, but instead I hope that I can just access the inbox on the device. Is it doable using the framework provided by Apple?

Answer 1

There currently is no API to access the device inbox.

Answer 2

Down the road apple will probably not provide API access to email directly, but they may open up a device-wide search API using Core Data or something similar. The only solution I can come up with to your problem would be if somehow you had an RSS feed of your inbox, which you could then easily import and parse in your custom app and search it to return the relevant mail items.