Chapter 5
In This Chapter
Setting up your accounts
Reading and managing email messages
Searching for email messages
Sending email messages
Setting email preferences
Using the Messages app
Lending your voice to iMessages
On any computing device, emails come and go with a variety of emotions. Messages may be amusing or sad, frivolous or serious. Electronic missives on the iPad are almost always touching.
The reason, of course, is that you’re touching the display to compose and read messages. Okay, so we’re having a little fun with the language. But the truth is, the bundled Mail app on the iPad is a modern program designed not only to send and receive text email messages but also to handle rich HTML email messages — formatted with font and type styles and embedded graphics. If someone sends you mail with a picture, it’s quite likely that the picture is visible right in the body of the message. (That’s the default behavior, but your results may vary depending on the sender’s email capabilities and your iPad’s mail settings.)
Furthermore, your iPad can read several types of file attachments, including (but not limited to) PDFs, JPG images, Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint slides, and Excel spreadsheets, as well as stuff produced through Apple’s own iWork software. Better still, all this sending and receiving of text, graphics, and documents can happen in the background, so you can surf the web or play a game while your iPad quietly and efficiently handles your email behind the scenes.
Apple even lets you grant VIP status to important senders so that there’s almost no chance you’ll miss mail from the people who matter most. Let’s see, there’s your spouse, your kids, your boss … are we missing anybody?
First things first. To use Mail, you need an email address. If you have broadband Internet access (that is, a cable modem, FiOS, or DSL), you probably received one or more email addresses when you signed up. If you’re one of the handful of readers who doesn’t already have an email account, you can get one for free from Yahoo! (http://mail.yahoo.com), Google (http://mail.google.com), AOL (www.aol.com), or numerous other service providers.
Or you can get a free premium email account (for example, yourname@iCloud.com) from Apple as part of iCloud. From your Home screen, just tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars⇒iCloud.
Finally, while the rest of the chapter focuses on the Mail app, you can also use Safari to access most email systems, if that’s your preference.
Chapter 3 explains the option of automatically syncing the email accounts on your Mac or Windows PC with your iPad. If you chose that option, your email accounts should be configured already on your iPad. And if you signed in with an iCloud account while setting up your iPad (read Chapter 2), you should already be good to go with your iCloud email account. You may proceed directly to the later section “See Me, Read Me, File Me, Delete Me: Working with Messages.”
Remember that syncing email accounts doesn’t have any effect on your email messages; it merely synchronizes the settings for email accounts so you don’t have to set them up manually on your iPad.
If you don’t want to sync the email accounts on your Mac or PC, you can set up an email account on your iPad manually. It’s not quite as easy as clicking a box and syncing your iPad, but it’s not rocket science either. Here’s how you get started:
Merely tap the account type you want to add to the iPad and follow the steps in the upcoming “Setting up an account with another provider” or “Setting up corporate email” section.
You see an Add Account screen shown in Figure 5-1, with the same account options that appear on the Welcome to Mail screen. Proceed to one of the next three sections, depending on the type of email account you selected.
If your account is with iCloud, Gmail (Google), Yahoo!, AOL, or Outlook, follow these steps:
If you don’t add a description (such as Work or Personal), the field usually fills in automatically with the contents of the Address field.
You’re finished. That’s all there is to setting up your account. You can now proceed to “See Me, Read Me, File Me, Delete Me: Working with Messages.”
If your email account is with a provider other than iCloud, Gmail (Google), Yahoo!, AOL, or Microsoft Outlook, you have a bit more work ahead of you. You need a bunch of information about your email account that you may not know or have handy.
We suggest that you scan the following instructions, note the items you don’t know, and go find the answers before you continue. To find the answers, look at the documentation you received when you signed up for your email account or visit the account provider’s website and search there.
Here’s how you set up an account:
With any luck, that’s all you’ll have to do. The iPad will look up and retrieve your account credentials. If that doesn’t happen, continue with Step 4.
You’re now ready to begin using your account. See the section “See Me, Read Me, File Me, Delete Me: Working with Messages.”
The iPad makes nice with the Microsoft Exchange servers that are a staple in large enterprises, as well as many smaller businesses.
What’s more, if your company supports Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, you can exploit push email so that messages arrive pronto on the iPad, just as they do on your other computers. (To keep everything up to date, the iPad also supports push calendars and push contacts.) For push to work with an Exchange Server, your company must be simpatico with one of the last several iterations of Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. If you run into a problem, ask your company’s IT or tech department.
Setting up Exchange email isn’t particularly taxing, and the iPad connects to Exchange right out of the box. However, you might have to consult your employer’s techie-types for certain settings.
Start setting up your corporate email on your iPad by following these steps:
That server address may begin with exchange.company.com.
You can choose Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and Reminders. When one of these switches is turned on, it turns green, as in Figure 5-5; otherwise, what you see appears dimmed.
If you’re moonlighting at a second job, you can configure more than one Exchange ActiveSync account on your iPad; prior to iOS 5, there was a limit of just one such account per device.
Now that your email accounts are all set up, it’s time to figure out how to receive and read the stuff. Fortunately, you’ve already done most of the heavy lifting when you set up your email accounts. Getting and reading your mail are a piece of cake.
You can tell when you have unread mail by looking at the Mail icon at the bottom of your Home screen. The cumulative number of unread messages across all your email inboxes appears in a little red badge in the upper-right area of the icon. If you have many unread messages, you may see the number appear as 4..6 (signifying, say, 46,376 messages — yes, we get lots of mail).
In the following sections, you find out how to read messages and attached files and send messages to the trash or maybe a folder when you’ve read them. Or, if you can’t find a message, check out the section on searching your email messages. Reading email on an iPad versus a desktop or notebook computer is similar, except you have the advantage of the iPad’s touchscreen.
To read your mail, tap the Mail icon on the Home screen. Remember that what appears on-screen depends on whether you’re holding the iPad in landscape or portrait mode as well as what was on the screen the last time you opened the Mail app:
Below the All Inboxes listing are the inboxes for your individual accounts. The number to the right of them, as you’d expect, is the number of unread messages in those accounts (799 in iCloud and 50,053 in Gmail, in the example shown in Figure 5-6).
If you tap an account, you see the available subfolders for that account (Drafts, Sent Mail, Trash, and so on).
One of these accounts is the VIP mailbox. The VIP mailbox lists all the messages from senders you deem the most important. We tell you how to give someone VIP status in the later section, “More things you can do with messages.”
Depending on the last time the Mail app was open, you may alternatively see previews of the messages in your inbox in the left panel. Previews show the name of the sender, the time the message arrived, the subject header, and the first two lines of the message. (In Settings, you can change the number of lines shown in the preview from one line to five or to no preview lines.)
Messages display in threads, or conversations, making them easy to follow. Of course, you can still view accounts individually. Follow these steps to read your email:
Again, this button may say All Inboxes, Mailboxes, or some other folder name, or it may say the name of the email account that is currently open. Within an email account, you can see the number of unread messages in each mailbox.
If you see a spinning gear, the iPad is searching for new mail.
If a blue dot appears next to a message, the message hasn’t been read.
The button carries a different name, depending on which account you have open. For example, it may say Exchange, Inbox, or something else.
When a message is on-screen, the buttons for managing incoming messages appear at the top, most of which you’re already familiar with.
Apple lets you thread messages, or have Mail automatically group related missives. The beauty of this arrangement is that you can easily trace an email conversation. When you organize messages by thread, the related messages appear as a single entry in the mailbox, with a double right-pointing arrow cluing you in that the message is indeed part of a larger ongoing exchange. If a message is not part of a thread, you just see the time, day, or date that that single message arrived. Figure 5-8 (left) shows that Bob and Melisa are hanging together by a thread — tapping the listing reveals underlying messages that make up the conversation. When you tap the message preview, you see previews of those underlying messages, as shown in Figure 5-8 (right).
When you look at a message that’s part of a thread, the numbers at the top of the screen (visible in portrait mode) tell you the message’s location in the conversation. For example, in Figure 5-8 (right), the message we chose to read is number 1 of 3 in this thread.
To turn on threading, go to the Home screen and tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then tap on Organize by Thread so that green is visible, as shown in Figure 5-9. You may have to scroll down to see the Organize by Thread setting.
Managing messages typically involves either moving the messages to a folder or deleting them. To herd your messages into folders, you have the following options:
With Spotlight search, you can quickly and easily search through a bunch of messages to find the one you want to read — such as that can’t-miss stock tip from your broker. In the search box at the top of a mailbox preview pane, type stock or whichever search term seems relevant. All matching emails that have already been downloaded appear. And you can run a search to find words within the body of an email message from the Mail app. (For more on Spotlight search, see Chapter 2.)
Search within Mail is quite powerful. For example, you can search by time frame by typing something along the lines of March meetings. Those search terms will find all the appropriate messages having to do with meetings that month. You can also search to find just flagged messages from your VIPs (flag unread VIP).
Via the iPad, you can also search just the current mailbox or across all your mailboxes. Just scroll to the top of the mailbox previews pane and tap either the All Inboxes tab or the tab for a given mailbox account. Then enter your search query in the box at the top of the preview pane.
Your iPad can even receive email messages with attachments in a wide variety of popular file formats. (See the nearby sidebar “Keeping files in order” if you’re not sure what file formats are.) Which file formats does the iPad support? Glad you asked:
Here’s how to read a supported attachment:
The attachment typically appears at the bottom of the message, so you probably need to scroll down to see it.
In some cases, the attachment downloads to your iPad and opens automatically. In other instances, you may have to tap the button representing the attachment to download it.
Or you can (again, for a document) open the Pages word processor if you’ve purchased it or downloaded it free if you bought a device with iOS 7 or iOS 8. You can also open the doc in certain other apps you may have. Incidentally, the documents you create in the Pages app are automatically saved to your iPad. With the latest version of Pages, you can also save a document to iCloud, where it can be made available automatically to the version of Pages for Mac computers. If you have a Windows PC, you can work with an iCloud version of Pages.
Wait! You can do even more with your incoming email messages:
If all recipients are displayed, you’ll see Hide instead of More; tap Hide to hide all names except the sender’s.
Sending email on your iPad is a breeze. You’ll encounter several subspecies of messages: pure text, text with a photo, a partially finished message (a draft) that you want to save and complete later, or a reply to an incoming message. You can also forward an incoming message to someone else — and in some instances print messages. The following sections examine these message types one at a time.
To compose a new email message, tap Mail on the Home screen. As before, what you see next depends on how you’re holding your iPad. In landscape mode, your email accounts or email folders are listed in a panel along the left side of the screen, with the actual message filling the larger window on the right.
Now, to create a message, follow these steps:
The New Message screen appears, like the one shown in Figure 5-11 (except your new message won’t have text typed in the message body yet).
If you start typing an email address, email addresses that match what you typed appear in a list below the To or Cc field. If the correct one is in the list, tap it to use it.
Doing so breaks the field into separate Cc, Bcc, and From fields (refer to Figure 5-11).
The Cc/Bcc label stands for carbon copy/blind carbon copy. Carbon copy (a throwback term from another era) is kind of an FYI to a recipient. It’s like saying, “We figure you’d appreciate knowing this, but you don’t need to respond.”
When using Bcc, you can include a recipient on the message, but other recipients can’t see that this recipient has been included. Bcc is great for those secret agent emails! Tap the respective Cc or Bcc field to type names. Or tap the + symbol that appears in those fields to add a contact.
The subject is optional, but it’s considered poor form to send an email message without one.
The message area is immediately below the Subject field. You have ample space to get your message across.
Apple includes a bunch of landscape-orientation keyboards in various apps, including Mail. When you rotate the iPad to its side, you can compose a new message using a wider-format virtual keyboard. And with iOS 8, you can go with an optional third-party keyboard.
Your message wings its way to its recipients almost immediately. If you aren’t in range of a Wi-Fi network or a cellular network when you tap Send, the message is sent the next time you’re in range of one of these networks.
One of the goodies in Mail is the capability to format email text by underlining, bolding, or italicizing it. First you select the text by pressing your finger against the screen until you see the options to select some or all of the text. After making your selection, you’ll have various other options: Cut, Copy, Paste, BIU, Replace, Quote Level, or Insert Photo or Video. To format text, tap the BIU button. Then apply whichever style (bold, italics, underline) suits your fancy.
If you tap Quote Level — another option that appears when you tap the right-pointing arrow after selecting a word — you can quote a portion of a message you’re responding to. Note: Increase Quote Level must be turned on in Settings. You can also increase or decrease the indentation in your outgoing message.
If you tap Replace, you are provided with alternative word choices to the word that you selected. Tap one of the alternative options to select it.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. When that’s the case, here’s how to send an email message with a photo attached:
An email message appears on-screen with the photo already attached. The image may appear to be embedded in the body of the message, but the recipient receives it as a regular email attachment.
On the Cc/Bcc line of your outgoing message, you see the size of the attached image. If you tap the size of the image shown, a new line appears, giving you the option to choose an alternative size among Small, Medium, Large, or Actual Size (in other words, keeping what you have). Your choice affects both the visible dimensions and file size of the photo (with the actual size of the file as measured in kilobytes or megabytes reported for each possible choice).
You have an alternative way of inserting pictures (or videos) into your outgoing mail messages. In the preceding “Formatting text in an email” section, we mention an Insert Photo or Video option that appears after you press your finger against the body of a message that you’re composing. Tap Insert Photo or Video, tap the album in which the photo (or video) you want to send exists, and then tap that photo or video. Tap Use to embed the image and proceed with composing.
Sometimes you start an email message but don’t have time to finish it. When that happens, you can save it as a draft and finish it some other time. Here’s how:
If you tap the Delete Draft button, the message disappears immediately without a second chance. Don’t tap Delete Draft unless you mean it.
To work on the message again, tap the Drafts mailbox. A list of all messages you saved as drafts appears. Tap the draft you want to work on, and it reappears on the screen. When you’re finished, you can tap Send to send it or tap Cancel to save it as a draft again.
When you receive a message and want to reply to it, open the message and then tap the reply icon (the curved arrow at the upper-right corner of the screen, as shown in Figure 5-12). Then tap Reply, Reply All, Forward, or Print, as described next:
To send your reply or forwarded message, tap the Send button as usual.
You can customize the mail you send and receive in lots of ways. In this section, we explore settings for sending email. Later in this chapter, we show you settings that affect the way you receive and read messages. In each instance, start by tapping Settings on the Home screen.
You can customize your mail in the following ways:
If you want to change other settings, tap the Sounds button at the top of the screen. If you’re finished setting the settings, tap the Home button on the front of your iPad.
This final discussion of Mail involves more settings that deal with your various email accounts.
Several settings affect the way you can check and view email. You might want to modify one or more, so we describe what they do and where to find them:
The last group of email settings we explore in this chapter deals with your email accounts. You most likely will never need most of these settings, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention them briefly. So here they are, whether you need ’em or not:
This setting doesn’t delete the account; it only hides it from view and stops it from sending or checking email until you turn it on again. (You can repeat this step to turn off calendars, contacts, reminders, and notes in a given account.)
You can find still more advanced Mail settings, reached the same way: Tap the Settings icon on the Home screen; tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars; and then tap the name of the account with which you want to work.
And that, as they say in baseball, retires the side. You’re now fully qualified to set up email accounts and send and receive email on your iPad. But, as the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was wont to say, there is one more thing …
The Messages app lets you exchange iMessages, pictures, contacts, videos, audio recordings, and locations with anyone using an Apple iDevice with iOS 5 or higher or with a Mac running OS X Mountain Lion, OS X Mavericks, or OS X Yosemite. In the following sections, find out how each of the iMessages features works.
To start a new message, tap the Messages icon on the Home screen to launch the Messages app and then tap the compose new message icon, the little pencil-and-paper icon in the left pane of the screen (on the Messages list).
At this point, with the To field active and awaiting your input, you can do three things:
The more letters you type, the shorter the list becomes. And after you’ve tapped the name of a contact, you can begin typing another name so that you can send this message to multiple recipients at once.
You have a fourth option if you want to compose the message first and address it later. Tap inside the text-entry field (the narrow rectangular area just above the keyboard and to the left of the Send button or microphone icon) to activate the field and then type or dictate your message. When you’ve finished typing, tap the To field and use one of the preceding techniques to address your message.
When you’ve finished addressing and composing, tap the Send button to send your message on its merry way. And that’s all there is to it.
The Messages app on your iPad is all-inclusive — that is, an iMessage need not be one to one. Instead, a group of folks can communicate. Start by preparing a message with a single recipient, and then tap the circled + in the To field to add people to the conversation from your contacts or manually.
By tapping the Details button, you can add people to an ongoing iMessage conversation. You can just as easily remove someone by tapping Details, swiping from left to right on the name of the person who is getting the heave-ho, and then tapping Delete. This works only if at least four folks are in the conversation.
The recipient of your recorded iMessage will be able to tap a Play button to listen to what you had to say. But in some cases, he or she had best listen right away because you can set things (in Settings) so that audio messages expire after two minutes. Your only other option is for the message to never expire.
Keep in mind that the microphone icon that lets you record your voice will be enabled only if you’re sending an iMessage to a chat partner.
When determining your settings for receiving iMessages, first things first. Decide whether you want to hear an alert when you receive a message:
You hear the sounds when you audition them in the Settings app, even if the ring/silent switch is set to Silent. After you exit the Settings app, however, you won’t hear a sound when a message arrives if the ring/silent switch is set to Silent.
The following pointers explain what you can do with iMessages that you receive:
These notifications are on by default; turn them off in the Settings app’s Notifications pane if you don’t care for them. You’ll also see any notifications for messages you’ve received in Notification Center.
To send a picture or video in a message, follow the instructions for sending a text message and then tap the camera icon to the left of the text-entry field at the bottom of the screen. You’ll then have the option of using an existing picture or video or taking a new one. You can also add text to photos or videos. When you’re finished, tap the Send button.
But just as you can send an audio message by using the Tap to Talk feature, you can record and send a video message through a similar shortcut. (And as with audio messages, go to Settings to make a video message go away after two minutes or to arrange so it doesn’t automatically expire.) To record a video message in this manner, press and hold down on the camera icon to the left of the text-entry box, and then slide your finger to the still camera icon or the video icon that appears to the left of the text. Slide your finger to the pop-up control circle and tap the video icon to shoot and record your video, and then swipe up to send the video as part of your message.
If you receive a picture or video in a message, it appears in a bubble just like text (refer to Figure 5-17). Tap the play icon to play it right in Messages. Tap again to have the video take over the full screen.
In full-screen mode, tap the share icon in the upper-right corner of a received video or picture for additional options, such as sharing the image on Facebook or Twitter, assigning it to a contact, or more. If you don’t see the icon, tap the picture or video once, and the icon will magically appear.
Here are some more things you can do with messages:
In iMessages, you can see when your own message has been delivered and read, and when the other person is readying a response.
The Apple Wireless Keyboard ($69) works with the iPad and the iPhone. Find out more in Chapter 17.
And that’s all there is to it. You are now an official iMessage maven.