Take Control of Mail on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch

Take Control of Mail on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, Fourth Edition

Devise an effective mobile strategy for iOS 6, and read your email with ease!

In this ebook, email expert Joe Kissell shares his real-world recommendations about the best ways to use the Mail app on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, helping you to develop a successful mobile email strategy for iOS 6. You'll get advice and directions for how to set up your accounts, receive email, read and send email, and file messages. You'll also learn to solve connection problems and work around feature limitations.

Special topics include handling Gmail and iCloud email accounts.

More Info
Contents & Intro
What’s New
FAQ
Blog

Read Me First
Introduction
iOS Mail Quick Start
Learn iOS Mail Basics
Understand Email Account Options
Develop a Mobile Mail Strategy
Configure Email Accounts
Troubleshoot Email Problems
About This Book

Read Me First

The iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch are fantastic tools for accessing email on the go, but they also have limitations not found in desktop email programs. This book teaches you everything you need to know to use email effectively on your mobile device, including developing a strategy that makes the most of its unique strengths. It was written by Joe Kissell, edited by Dan Frakes, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc.

Introduction

One of the things I like best about my iPhone and iPad is their power to keep me connected to my email wherever I am. I use email far more frequently than I talk on the phone, so for me, having a capable, always-connected email device (with a Web browser, RSS reader, Twitter client, and a few other tools thrown in as a bonus) more than justifies the expense of these devices.

With each new release of iOS, the included Mail app gets better and better. In iOS 6, Mail has a number of new features that make it more powerful and easier to use. Even so, some things you may want to do with email are still difficult or even impossible on your iOS device. In other instances, the ways in which you must perform some common task are obscure or confusing. And let’s not forget the idiosyncrasies of various email providers, which may make Mail behave unexpectedly.

Because I’ve written quite a bit about improving your email experience on a Mac, I’ve received lots of inquiries about how to do similar sorts of things on iOS devices. This book is my attempt to answer those questions. Beyond teaching the mechanics of configuring accounts, setting preferences, and navigating the interface, I want to show you how to think about email in a different, iOS-friendly way. By changing your habits and setup a bit (even on your Mac or PC), you’ll make your mobile device a better, more effective email tool.

I hope that by the time you’re finished reading this book, you’ll know everything necessary to make smart decisions about how to manage email on your mobile device, as well as tricks and hidden features that will save you time and effort. Your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch may still be less capable than a desktop email client, but I can get you close to the functionality most of us need from a mobile email program.

This book assumes that your iOS device is using iOS 6 or later. As a result, it doesn’t cover the original iPhone; the iPhone 3G; the first-, second-, and third-generation iPod touch; and the first-generation iPad. (If you need help with one of these older devices, note that the iOS 4 and iOS 5 versions of this ebook are available to you on this ebook’s blog, which you can access through Ebook Extras.)

iOS Mail Quick Start

This book shows you how to manage email on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. If you’re already comfortable with the fundamentals of sending, receiving, and working with email, you can skip Learn iOS Mail Basics initially and refer back to it when needed. Other than that, this text makes the most sense when read in order, as later chapters build on earlier ones.

Get to know Mail on your iOS device:

Discover how to do the essential tasks of sending, receiving, reading, and filing mail; see Learn iOS Mail Basics.

Create a plan of attack:

Learn about email protocols, push and fetch, Gmail oddities, and other essential background information that can affect how you use your iOS device for email; see Understand Email Account Options.
Decide which accounts you should access using your iOS device and how to organize them for maximum efficiency; see Develop a Mobile Mail Strategy.

Deal with the nuts and bolts of email configuration:

Set up and customize the email accounts on your iOS device; see Configure Email Accounts.
Solve email problems; see Troubleshoot Email Problems.

What’s New in the Fourth Edition

iOS 6, released in September 2012, features a number of changes to the way the Mail app works. In this edition, I cover those changes, as well as other relevant developments that affect email on iOS devices. Major changes described in this edition include the following:

Mail’s new pull-to-refresh gesture; see Check Your Mail
VIP senders; see The VIP List
Changes to the way Mail handles flags and quoted text; see The Message View
New (and unfortunate) ways of handling alternative From addresses; see Change Your From Address, and especially the sidebar Changes in From Address Behavior
The capability to add photo and video attachments right from within Mail; see Outgoing Attachments
For iCloud accounts, an Archive feature, the capability to disable individual aliases as From addresses, and the addition of icloud.com email addresses; see iCloud Special Features
Significant improvements to how Mail handles Gmail accounts; see Four Methods to Access a Gmail Account and Gmail Accounts
Per-address signatures; see Other Mail Settings
Per-account notifications; see Mail Notifications

In addition to making these changes, I’ve removed all information about MobileMe and updated the text in many places to reflect the latest truth—for example, modifications to Gmail’s interface and details about OS X that are different in 10.8 Mountain Lion.

What Was New in the Third Edition

iOS 5 was a huge update, and as a result, the third edition of this book is too. Mail in particular received many welcome new features. In addition, numerous general changes to iOS itself (such as notifications, text expansion, and iCloud support) make their presence felt within Mail. I’m especially pleased that several shortcomings I complained about in the previous version of this book have disappeared.

Here are the major email-related changes in iOS 5 I cover in this book:

Mail has a new layout in portrait mode on the iPad. See iPad.
You can now add, delete, rename, or move mailboxes in a server-based account. See The Mailbox List.
You can now mark multiple messages at once. See The Message List.
Mail lets you flag or unflag messages. See The Message View and, for the Gmail connection, Starred.
iOS 5’s Shortcuts feature lets you use abbreviations that expand into longer text elements, such as signatures. See Quote Properly, Touch Typing, and Single System-Wide Signature.
You can now move addressees between To, Cc, and Bcc fields; format message text with bold, italics, and underline; change the quote level for individual paragraphs; and use the iOS dictionary when composing messages. See Compose and Send a Message.
When viewing a PDF attached to an email message, you can now see thumbnails of each page. In addition, instructions for resizing outgoing images are a bit different on an iPad than on an iPhone or iPod touch. See Incoming Attachments.
Mail can finally search within message contents. See Search for Mail Messages.
You can now sync Mail accounts from your Mac or PC to your iOS device over Wi-Fi. See Sync Accounts with iTunes.
iOS 5 supports iCloud accounts. See iCloud Accounts (and, indeed, most of the rest of the book!).
iOS 5 also supports Hotmail accounts (using the Exchange ActiveSync protocol). See Hotmail Accounts.
Notes syncing has changed quite a bit, largely because of iCloud. See Notes on Notes.
You can now encrypt and/or digitally sign messages (as well as view incoming signed and encrypted messages). See S/MIME.
Mail participates in iOS 5’s Notification Center, giving you many new options for message notifications. See Mail Notifications.

In addition to these major changes, I’ve updated the text in many places to reflect the latest truth—for example, modifications to Gmail’s interface, and details about Mac OS X that are different in 10.7 Lion.

Reminder: No More Gmail via Exchange

March 4, 2013 --

As Michael noted in the previous blog entry here, Google has phased out access to Gmail via Exchange ActiveSync for new users. So, what I say about that approach in "Four Methods to Access a Gmail Account" starting on page 50—and particularly the subtopics "Set Up Gmail as Exchange ActiveSync" and "Choose a Gmail Method (or More Than One)" on pages 53–55—is now true only if you'd previously set up your device to access a Gmail account using Exchange ActiveSync.

If you have a device that was never previously configured to access Gmail via Exchange, that option is no longer available to you; you'll have to choose from among the remaining three methods, of which one of the IMAP varieties will likely serve you best.

—Joe Kissell

Google Sync Being Sunsetted and What It Means

December 21, 2012 --

Google has announced that Google Sync, its syncing method that uses Microsoft's ActiveSync technology, will no longer be available as a syncing option for most users. Support for it, except for paid users of its Google Apps service, will end on January 30 for Mail and Contacts; it is already unavailable for Google Calendar syncing. Instead, IMAP, CardDAV, and CalDAV are the preferred protocols for syncing. This means, in the case of iOS devices, that push email and calendar events will no longer be available to new users for Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar (Google, however, will continue to support accounts that have already been set up to use Google Sync). You can find out more about this change in the TidBITS article, Google Drops Google Sync for Most iOS Users, and in Joe Kissell's Macworld article, What the End of Google Sync Means to You.

—Michael E. Cohen

Running a Mail Spam Filter on an iPad or iPhone

May 2, 2012 --

Take Control reader Genevieve S. wrote in with an interesting question a few days ago:

Genevieve: Do you know any third-party app that can filter mail on iPad and iPhone—i.e., apply rules?
Tonya’s reply: I don’t know of any apps that can filter mail locally on the iPad, but I’ve cc’d Adam and Joe here to see if either of them has a suggestion. Personally, I use my gmail account on the iPad, and Google handles the filtering on the server.
Joe’s reply: There is an app called ibisMail, which comes in both iPad and iPhone versions, that does filtering on the device. However, I do what Tonya does—let a server-based filter do all the work before messages appear on any of my devices.
Genevieve: Thank you for responding. I use the Gmail filter too, but the AT&T/Yahoo filter is lousy. This is not a problem when receiving mail on the Mac—the rules in Mail handle the leakage—but if I read the mail on the iPhone, a local filter would help.
Adam jumps in: You could forward the other account to Gmail to get the benefit of its filter. Lots of people do that.
Genevieve: Great idea!!

In the third edition of Take Control of Mail on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, Joe touches on email forwarding in “Decide Which Account(s) to Use,” and he references a Macworld article that he wrote—Streamline e-mail with Gmail. The Macworld article discusses how to forward a non-Gmail email account through Gmail.

—Michael E. Cohen

Joe Tells All About His Latest Take Control Book

December 21, 2011 --

Okay, that's journalistic hyperbole (who can tell everything about a book in 37 minutes?), but Joe talks engagingly and informatively about the third edition of Take Control of Mail on Your iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. You can either listen to or watch his conversation with Chuck Joiner to find out the latest about Mail in iOS 5.

—Michael E. Cohen

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Book Info

iPad & Kindle

About the Author

Book Reviews

Author Interviews

Table of Contents

Read Me First

Introduction

iOS Mail Quick Start

Get to know Mail on your iOS device:

Create a plan of attack:

Deal with the nuts and bolts of email configuration:

What’s New in the Fourth Edition

What Was New in the Third Edition

Which iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch models does this ebook cover?

How can I figure out which iPhone or iPod touch I have?

Does this ebook really cover the iPod touch?

Does this ebook care which type of computer I sync my device with?

Can I read this ebook on an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Kindle?

Ask a Question

Send Us Your Comments!

Reminder: No More Gmail via Exchange

Google Sync Being Sunsetted and What It Means

Running a Mail Spam Filter on an iPad or iPhone

Joe Tells All About His Latest Take Control Book