Chapter 12
In This Chapter
Setting up your accounts
Reading and managing email messages
Searching for email messages
Sending email messages
Setting email preferences
Chapter 6 shows you how well your iPhone sends SMS text messages, MMS messages, and iMessages. But such messages aren’t the iPhone’s only written communication trick, not by a long shot. One of the niftiest things your iPhone can do is send and receive real, honest-to-gosh email, using Mail, its modern email app. It’s designed not only to send and receive text email messages but also to handle rich HTML email messages — formatted email messages complete with font and type styles and embedded graphics.
Furthermore, your iPhone can read several types of file attachments, including PDF, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents, 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 that you can surf the web or talk to a friend while your iPhone quietly and efficiently handles your email behind the scenes.
The Mail app is compatible with the most popular email providers: Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL, Outlook, and Apple’s own iCloud service. As part of iCloud, Apple issues you a free, ad-free iCloud.com email address.
As you discover in this chapter, you can access a unified inbox of all your email accounts (assuming you have multiple accounts). Moreover, you can organize messages by thread, or conversation. You can bestow VIP status to your most important senders. And through the Continuity and Handoff features, which are new to iOS 8, you can start composing an email on your iPhone and finish it on a Mac with OS X Yosemite.
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), Microsoft (www.outlook.com), AOL (www.aol.com), or one of many other service providers.
Chapter 3 explains the option of automatically syncing the email accounts on your computer with your iPhone. If you chose that option, your email accounts should be configured on your iPhone already. You may proceed directly to the later section, “Darling, You Send Me (Email).”
If you haven’t yet chosen that option but want to set up your account the easy way now, go to Chapter 3 and read the section on syncing mail accounts with the iPhone. Then you, too, can proceed directly to the “Darling, You Send Me (Email)” section.
If you don’t want to sync the email accounts on your computer, you can set up an email account on your iPhone manually. It’s not quite as easy as clicking a box and syncing your iPhone, but it’s not rocket science either.
If you have no email accounts on your iPhone, the first time you launch Mail, you’re walked through the following procedure. If you have one or more email accounts on your iPhone already and want to add a new account manually, start on the Home screen by tapping Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars⇒Add Account.
Either way, you should now be staring at the Add Account screen, shown in Figure 12-1. Proceed to one of the next two sections, depending on your email account.
If your account is with Apple’s own iCloud service, Google’s Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, or Microsoft’s Outlook, tap the appropriate button on the Add Account screen now. If you’re setting up company email through Microsoft Exchange, skip to the “Setting up corporate email” section. If your account is with a provider other than the ones listed, tap the Other button and skip to the next section.
Enter your name, email address, and password, as shown in Figure 12-2. The description field is usually filled in automatically with the content you have in the address field, but you can replace that text with your own description (such as Work or Personal).
Tap the Next button in the upper-right corner of the screen. Your email provider will verify your credentials. If you pass muster, that’s all there is to setting up your account.
If your email account is with a provider other than iCloud, Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, or Outlook, you have a bit more work ahead of you. You’re going to 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, although you may have to endure a spinning cursor for a while as the iPhone attempts to retrieve information and validate your account with your provider. Otherwise, continue with Step 4.
You may have to scroll down to the bottom of the screen to see the outgoing mail server fields (refer to Figure 12-3, right).
The iPhone is friendly for business users, in large measure because it makes nice with the Microsoft Exchange servers that are a staple in large enterprises.
What’s more, if your company supports something known as Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, you can exploit push email (messages are pushed to your iPhone automatically as opposed to being pulled in on a schedule) so that messages arrive pronto on the iPhone, just as they do on your other computers. (To keep everything up-to-date, the iPhone also supports push calendars and push contacts.) For push to work, your company must be simpatico with one of the last several iterations of Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. Ask your company’s IT or tech department if you run into an issue.
Setting up Exchange email isn’t particularly taxing, and the iPhone connects to Exchange right out of the box. However, you still might have to consult your employer’s techie types for certain settings.
Start out by tapping the Microsoft Exchange button on the Add Account screen. Fill in what you can: your email address, username (usually as domainuser), and password. Or call on your IT staff for assistance.
On the next screen, shown in Figure 12-4, enter the server address, assuming that the Microsoft Exchange Autodiscover service didn’t already find it. That address usually begins with exchange.company.com.
After your corporate account is fully configured, you have to choose which information you want to synchronize through Exchange. You can choose Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and Reminders by tapping each one. When one of these is turned on, a green button is visible, as shown in Figure 12-5; otherwise what you see appears dimmed.
Now that your email accounts are all set up, it’s time to find out how to receive and read the stuff. Fortunately, you already did most of the heavy lifting when you set up your email accounts. Getting and reading your mail is 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 capsule in the upper-right area of the icon. If you have many unread messages, you may see the number appear as 4..6 (signifying, in this case, 45,866 messages — yes, we get lots of mail).
Tap the Mail icon now to summon the Mailboxes screen shown in Figure 12-6. At the top is the All Inboxes inbox, which as its name suggests is a repository for all the messages across all your accounts. The number to the right of All Inboxes should match the number in the Mail icon on your Home page. (If it doesn’t, some fuzzy math is going on or you have so many messages, the tally can’t be shown on your Home page.) Again, the number represents the cumulative tally of unread messages across all your accounts.
Below the All Inboxes listing are the inboxes for your individual email accounts. The tally this time is only for the unread messages in each account.
Scroll down toward the bottom of the Mailboxes screen and you’ll find an Accounts section with a similar listing of email accounts. But if you tap on the listings here, you’ll see subfolders for each individual account (Drafts, Sent, Junk, and so on), as shown in Figure 12-7.
You can add new mailboxes by tapping Mailboxes⇒Edit⇒New Mailbox — if your email provider allows you to add (and for that matter, delete) mailboxes. Not all do. Choose a name and location for the new mailbox and then tap Done. Or tap an existing mailbox, and then tap Delete Mailbox to get rid of it (and all its contents).
To read your mail, tap an inbox: either All Inboxes to examine all your messages in one unified view or an individual account to check out messages from just that account.
When you tap a mailbox to open it, Mail fetches the most recent messages. Tap a message to read it. When a message is on the screen, icons for managing incoming messages appear below it. These controls are addressed in the next section.
Meanwhile, swipe down to refresh a mailbox. You will momentarily see a spinning gear until the phone is satisfied that all the emails that can be delivered have been delivered.
On the iPhone 6 Plus in landscape mode, you get a two-panel view that takes advantage of the capacious 5.5-inch screen on that device. In the left pane you see the header and first line from messages in your inbox. In the right pane, you see the contents of the highlighted email.
When a message is on your screen, you can do many tasks in addition to reading it. Check out Figure 12-8 for the location of the controls mentioned in this section.
By tapping the icons labeled in Figure 12-8, you can perform the following actions:
You can delete email messages without opening them (see Figure 12-9).
Delete your messages in a few ways:
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 show up 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 see a single pointing arrow. Figure 12-11 (left) shows that Bob and Susan are part of the same conversation — tapping the listing reveals underlying messages that make up the conversation.
To turn on threading, go to the Home screen and tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars⇒Organize by Thread. Finally, tap the switch so that green is visible, as shown in Figure 12-12. You may have to scroll down to see the Organize by Thread setting.
When you look at a message that’s part of a thread, the numbers at the top of the screen tell you the message’s location in the conversation. For example, in Figure 12-13, the message is number 1 of 3 in this thread.
As part of Spotlight search, you can easily search through a bunch of messages to find the one you want to read right away — such as that can’t-miss stock tip from your broker. Tap the status bar to scroll through the top of the inbox or manually scroll to get there. You can type stock or whichever search term seems relevant. All matching emails that have already been downloaded appear with your search term in bold to make the reference easier to find. Scroll to the top of the screen to search your current mailbox. If you have multiple email accounts on your phone, you’ll also see an option at the top of the screen to search all your mailboxes.
If you’re using Exchange, iCloud, or certain IMAP-type email accounts, you may even be able to search messages stored on the email provider’s servers or out in the Internet cloud, assuming of course that you have an active Internet connection.
Your iPhone can even receive email messages with attachments in a wide variety of file formats. Here are some of the most common:
Here’s how to read an attachment:
You probably need to scroll down to see the attachment, which appears at the bottom of the message. The attachment downloads to your iPhone (see Figure 12-14, left) and opens automatically (see Figure 12-14, right).
Wait! You can do even more with your incoming email messages:
If all recipients are displayed, you see Hide in blue rather than More. Tap Hide to hide all names except the sender’s and your own.
A couple of other options are presented here. Tap Move to Junk for messages that are unwanted product pitches, advertising, or dare we suggest, something worse, pornography or a scam. Or tap Notify Me to receive notifications when anyone responds to the email thread.
Alternatively, you can mark messages in bulk as unread by tapping the Edit button and then tapping the little circle next to each message you want to mark as unread. Or tap Mark All so that all the buttons are filled in. From here, you can move the marked messages or trash them.
If the link opens Safari, Phone, or Maps and you want to return to your email, press the Home button on the front of your iPhone and then tap the Mail icon. You can also double-tap the Home button, tap Mail from the multitasking preview screen, or gesture your way back to the previous app, using a three-finger swipe.
So now that you’re a whiz at reading and organizing incoming messages, let’s look at how to use your iPhone to send email.
Several subspecies of messages are available: pure text, text with a photo, a partially finished message (a draft) that you want to save and complete later, a reply to an incoming message, and a message you want to forward to someone else. The following sections examine these subsets one at a time.
To compose a new email message, tap Mail on the Home screen to open the Mailboxes screen (refer to Figure 12-6) or whichever screen was up when you last left the app.
Now, to create a message, follow these steps:
The icon appears on all the Mail screens, so don’t worry if you’re not at the main Mailboxes screen. A screen like the one shown in Figure 12-15 appears.
You can rearrange names in the address field by dragging them around, moving, say, a name from the To field to the Cc field.
Doing so breaks the single field into separate Cc, Bcc, and From fields. The Cc label stands for carbon copy, and Bcc stands for blind carbon copy. Bcc enables you to include a recipient on the message that other recipients can’t see has been included. It’s great for those secret agent emails!
Or tap the + icon that appears in one of those fields to add a contact.
If you start typing an email address, email addresses that match what you typed appear in a list, temporarily covering up the To, Cc, or Bcc field. If the correct one is in the list, tap it to use it.
The current email account from which you’re sending your message is highlighted in bold type at the bottom of the screen, as shown in Figure 12-16. You can scroll up or down to bring an alternate account to the forefront. This step assumes, of course, that you have more than one account and want to send mail from an account different than the one shown.
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.
Your message wings its way to its recipients almost immediately. If you aren’t in range of a Wi-Fi network or a cellular data network when you tap Send, the message is sent the next time you’re in range of one of these networks.
Forgive the cliché, but sometimes a picture truly is worth a thousand words. When that’s the case, send an email message with a photo enclosed as follows.
After addressing a message and perhaps composing a few words, press your finger against the screen and let go. At first you see options for Select, Select All, and Paste. Ignore these for now and instead tap on the right-pointing arrow. Doing so leads you to the Insert Photo or Video option, as shown in Figure 12-17, left. Tap that and you’re transported to a list of your photo albums, from which you can select a picture or video. When you find the one you want, tap Choose.
If you selected a video, it will be compressed and an icon for the movie will be inserted into the body of the message, as shown in Figure 12-17, right. (The recipient would tap that icon to play the movie.)
If you choose a photo, you’ll see the actual picture inserted in the message body, as shown in Figure 12-18. When you’re ready to send your email off, tap Send and choose an appropriate file size for the image. Off it goes.
An email message appears on-screen with the photo already attached. The image appears to be embedded in the body of the outgoing message and may appear in the same way to the recipient, but the recipient receives the image as a regular email. Just address the message and type whatever text you like, as you did for an all-text message in the preceding section, and then tap the Send button. You again choose a file size for your picture: Small, Medium, Large, or Actual Size.
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: Start an email message as described in one of the two preceding sections. When you’re ready to save the message as a draft, tap the Cancel button in the upper-left corner of the screen and three buttons appear. Tap the Save Draft button if you want to save this message as a draft and complete it another time; tap the Delete Draft button to ditch your efforts; or tap Cancel to return to the message and continue crafting it to perfection.
To work on the message again, tap the Drafts mailbox for the account in question. All messages you saved as drafts hang out in that mailbox. Tap the one you want to resume working on so that it reappears on the screen. When you’re finished, tap Send to send it or Cancel to go through the drill of saving it as a draft again.
One of the goodies in iPhone 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 shown in Figure 12-19, left. After making your selection, tap the right-pointing arrow in that list of options to display the additional options shown in Figure 12-19, center. Then tap the BIU button. Apply whichever style (Bold, Italics, Underline) suits your fancy, as shown in Figure 12-19, right.
If you tap Quote Level — another option that appears when you tap the right-pointing arrow after selecting a word (it’s not shown Figure 12-19) — you can quote a portion of a message you’re responding to. You can also increase or decrease the indentation in your outgoing message.
Other options appear as well. If you tap Replace, you’ll see other word options for replacing the word you selected, perhaps formal instead of format. Tap Define, and you can summon a dictionary definition for the highlighted word.
When you receive a message and want to reply to it, open the message and then tap the reply, reply all, forward, print icon (labeled in Figure 12-8). Then tap the Reply, Reply All, Forward, or Print button.
The Reply button creates a new email message addressed to the sender of the original message. The Reply All button creates an outgoing email message addressed to the sender and all other recipients of the original message. In both cases, the Subject line is retained with a Re: prefix added. So if the original Subject line were iPhone Tips, the reply’s Subject line would be Re: iPhone Tips. You also see text from the original message in the body of your reply (whether you are replying to one person or more than one person).
Tapping the Forward button creates an unaddressed email message that contains the text of the original message. Add the email address(es) of the person or people to whom you want to forward the message, and then tap Send. In this case, rather than a Re: prefix, the Subject line begins with Fwd:. So this time the Subject line reads Fwd: iPhone Tips.
To send your reply or forwarded message, tap the Send button as usual.
Printing requires an AirPrint-capable printer. If you have one, tap the Print option.
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, you start by tapping Settings on the Home screen. Then:
The instructions in the preceding paragraph are similar for all the settings we discuss in this section and later sections, so we won’t repeat them. To summarize, if you want to continue using settings, you tap whichever button appears in the upper-left corner of the screen — it might be named Settings, Mail, Accounts, or something else. The point is that the upper-left button always returns you to the preceding screen so that you can change other settings. The same concept applies to pressing the Home button on the front of your iPhone when you’re finished setting a setting. That action always saves the change you just made and returns you to the Home screen.
That’s what you need to know about the settings that apply to sending email.
This final discussion of Mail involves more settings that deal with your various email accounts.
Several settings affect the way you check and view email. You might want to modify one or more, so we describe what they do and where to find them:
From this setting, you can assign the push and fetch status for each account. Push is shown as an option only if the email account you tapped supports the feature.
As of this writing, Yahoo!, iCloud, Google, and Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync were among the pushy email accounts (but only in a good way).
The next group of 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:
When you turn off an account, you don’t delete it. You only hide the account from view and stop it from sending or checking email until you turn it on again.
The last settings are reached the same way: On the Home screen, tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then tap the name of the account with which you want to work. Next, tap Account — you’ll see the email address selected — and then tap Advanced. The settings you see under Advanced and how they appear vary a little by account. This list describes some of the ones you may see:
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 iPhone.