Chapter 12

The Email Must Get Through

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.

Prep Work: Setting Up Your Accounts

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.

Many free email providers add a small bit of advertising at the end of your outgoing messages. If you’d rather not be a billboard for your email provider, either use the address(es) that came with your broadband Internet access ([email protected] or [email protected], for example) or pay a few dollars a month for a premium email account that doesn’t tack advertising (or anything else) onto your messages. As mentioned, you can get a free email account as part of Apple’s iCloud service.

Setting up your account the easy way

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.

Setting up your account the less easy way

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.

Setting up an email account with the Big Guys

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.

Setting up an account with another provider

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:

1. On the Add Account screen, tap the Other button.
2. Tap Add Mail Account.
3. Fill in the name, address, password, and description in the appropriate fields, as if you were setting up an account for iCloud, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo!, or AOL. Tap Next.

   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.

4. Tap the button at the top of the screen that denotes the type of email server this account uses: IMAP or POP, as shown in Figure 12-3, left.
5. Fill in the Internet host name for your incoming mail server, which should look something like mail.providername.com or mail.providername.net.
6. Fill in your username and password.
7. Enter the Internet host name for your outgoing mail server, which should look something like smtp.providername.com or smtp.providername.net.

   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).

8. Enter your username and password in the appropriate fields.
9. Tap the Next button in the upper-right corner to create the account.

Some outgoing mail servers don’t need your username and password. The fields for these items on your iPhone note that they’re optional. Still, we suggest that you fill them in anyway. That way, you won’t have to add them later if your outgoing mail server does require an account name and password, which most do these days.

Setting up corporate email

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.

The company you work for doesn’t want just anyone to have access to your email — heaven forbid if your phone is lost or stolen. So your bosses may insist that you change the passcode lock inside Settings on the phone. (The passcode is different from the password for your email account.) Skip over to Chapter 14 to find instructions for adding or changing a passcode. (We’ll wait for you.) Now if your iPhone ends up in the wrong hands, your company can remotely wipe the contents clean.

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.

The iPhone typically keeps email synchronized for three days. To sync for a longer period, head to Settings and tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then tap the Mail account that is using ActiveSync. Tap Mail Days to Sync, and then tap No Limit or choose another time frame (1 day, 1 week, 2 weeks, or 1 month).

If you’re moonlighting at a second job, you can configure more than one Exchange ActiveSync account on your iPhone; there used to be a limit of just one such account per phone.

See Me, Read Me, File Me, Delete Me: Working with Messages

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).

Reading messages

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.

If you have just a single mail account configured on your iPhone, you’ll see only that one inbox on the Mailboxes screen.

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.

Managing messages

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:

• View the next message.
• View the preceding message.
• Flag the message to denote its importance, move it to junk, mark it as unread, or get notified when anyone replies to the email thread.
• File this message in another folder. When the list of folders appears, tap the folder where you want to file the message
• Delete this message. You have to dig in the trash to retrieve the message if you tap the delete message icon by mistake. Go to Mail Settings if you want the iPhone to ask you before deleting, or trashing, a message. As noted later in this chapter, in some instances you can archive mail instead of deleting it.
• Reply, reply all, forward, or print this message.
• Create a new email message.

You can delete email messages without opening them (see Figure 12-9).

Delete your messages in a few ways:

• Swipe left about halfway across the message, and then tap the red Trash button that appears to the right of the message, adjacent to the yellow Flag and gray More buttons. If you swipe all the way to the left instead by keeping your finger pressed against the screen, you’ll trash the message immediately. Be careful if that was not your intention. Oh, and if you swipe in the other direction (yes, to the right), you can mark a message as unread. In some email accounts, notably Google’s Gmail, an Archive button may appear instead of Trash, depending on whether you turned on Archive Messages in Settings. In that case, tap the Archive button to archive the message; it is not deleted. We get to that More button later in the chapter.
• Tap the Edit button (in the upper-right corner of the Inboxes screen or a mail subfolder screen), and then tap the little circle to the left of each message you want to remove. Tapping that circle puts a check mark in it and highlights in blue the Trash button at the bottom of the screen. Tap that Trash button to erase all messages you selected. Deleted messages are moved to the Trash folder.
• Trash the message (or mark it as read) inside an interactive notification that appears regardless of the screen you’re viewing. The advantage to this method is you don’t have to leave the screen to delete the message. Just tap the Trash button in the notification.
• Another fresh trick arrived with iOS 8. When you’ve opened a message to read it, drag the entire message from the left edge of the screen toward the right. Upon doing so, you can sneak a peek at the messages in your inbox, as revealed in Figure 12-10.

Threading messages

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.

You can search for an item in the thread by scrolling to the top of the thread’s Mail listing and typing your query in the Search Thread box. Consider this a prelude to the next section on searching email messages.

Searching emails

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.

The capability to search emails may vary by email account. In some instances, you can search only whole words; in other cases, partial words may work.

You can delete messages in bulk. In much the same way, you can move them to another folder in bulk. Tap Edit and then tap the circle to the left of each message you want to move so that a check mark appears. Tap the Move button at the bottom of the screen (refer to Figure 12-9), and tap the new folder where you want those messages to hang out.

Don’t grow too attached to attachments

Your iPhone can even receive email messages with attachments in a wide variety of file formats. Here are some of the most common:

• Apple Keynote: .key
• Apple Numbers: .numbers
• Apple Pages: .pages
• Contact information: .vcf
• Images: .jpg, .tiff, .gif, .png
• Microsoft Excel: .xls, .xlsx
• Microsoft PowerPoint: .ppt, .pptx
• Microsoft Word: .doc, .docx
• Preview and Adobe Acrobat: .pdf
• Rich Text: .rtf
• Text: .txt
• Web pages: .htm, .html

The iPhone can also play many types of audio attachments that turn up in an email, including MP3, AAC, WAV, and AIFF.

If the attachment is a file format not supported by the iPhone (for example, a Photoshop .psd file), you see the name of the file but you can’t open it on your iPhone. In some other instances, you may see an Open In button if one of your apps can handle the file type.

Here’s how to read an attachment:

1. Open the mail message containing the attachment.
2. Tap the 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).

   

3. Read the attachment.
4. Tap the Message button in the upper-left corner of the screen to return to the message text.

If the attachment has more than one page, the number of pages will be noted at the top of the page you’re reading. In Figure 12-14, right, for example, you’re seeing page 18 of 18.

More things you can do with messages

Wait! You can do even more with your incoming email messages:

• To see all recipients of a message, tap More (displayed in blue) to the right of the visible recipient’s name.

  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.

• To add an email recipient or sender to your contacts, tap the name or email address at the top of the message and then tap either Create New Contact or Add to Existing Contact.
• To mark a message as unread or to flag it to call attention to it later, tap the flag icon (at the lower-left corner of the screen). Tap either Mark as Unread or Flag, depending on your preference. If you choose the former, the message is again included in the unread message count on the Mail icon on your Home screen and its mailbox again has a blue dot next to it in the message list for that mailbox. If you choose Flag, an orange flag or orange dot will appear next to the message in the message list. (You can switch from flag to dot or back in Settings.)

  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.

• To make a sender a VIP, tap the name or email address at the top of the message and then tap Add to VIP. This tool is especially valuable considering that most of us deal with lots of unimportant email messages, which tend to bury the important messages from the spouse, the kids, the boss, and key clients. A star appears next to any incoming messages from a VIP or threads that the designated VIP is part of. The feature is iCloud-enabled, so a VIP on your iPhone will remain a VIP across all your iOS devices. You can summon mail from all your VIPs by tapping the VIP folder in the list of mailboxes (refer to Figure 12-6). To demote a VIP to what we jokingly refer to as an NVIP (translation: not very important person), tap the name or email at the top of the message and then tap Remove from VIP. Don’t worry; he or she will never know.
• To zoom in and out of a message, employ the pinch and unpinch gestures, which we suspect you excel at by now.
• To follow a link in a message, tap the link. (Links are typically displayed in blue and may be underlined, but sometimes they appear in other colors.) If the link is a URL, Safari opens and displays the web page. If the link is a phone number, the Phone app opens and offers to dial the number. If the link is a map, Maps opens and displays the location. If the link is a day, date, or time, you can tap the item to create a calendar event. If the link is a shipper’s tracking number, you may be able to get the status of a package. If the link is an email address, a pre-addressed blank email message is created.

  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.

The interactive notification feature is a big part of iOS 8 and has a major role in Mail. For example, if the Mail program recognizes a restaurant or a flight status update that arrives in an incoming email, you’ll receive a notification to that effect, giving you a chance to add the information to your calendar. If a phone number is recognized in a mail message, a notification will ask if you want to add the number to your contacts.

Darling, You Send Me (Email)

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.

Makin’ messages

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.

Sending an all-text message

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:

1. Tap the new message icon (labeled in Figure 12-8), in the lower-right corner of the screen.

   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.

2. Enter the names or email addresses of the recipients in one of the following ways:
   • Type the names or email addresses of the recipients in the To field.
   • Tap the microphone key on the virtual keyboard to dictate the names or email addresses of the recipients in the To field.
   • Tap the + icon to the right of the To field to select a contact or contacts from your iPhone’s address book.

   You can rearrange names in the address field by dragging them around, moving, say, a name from the To field to the Cc field.

   

3. (Optional) Enter a name in the Cc field, Bcc field, or both fields. Or choose to send mail from a different account in the From field, as follows:
   1. Tap the field labeled Cc/Bcc, From.

      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!

   2. Tap the respective Cc or Bcc field and type the name.

      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.

   3. Tap the From field to send the message from any of your email accounts on the fly.

      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.

      

4. In the Subject field, type or dictate a subject.

   The subject is optional, but it’s considered poor form to send an email message without one.

5. In the message area, type or dictate your message.

   The message area is immediately below the Subject field.

6. Tap Send in the upper-right corner of the screen.

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.

Apple includes a bunch of landscape orientation keyboards for various apps, including Mail. When you rotate the phone to its side, you can compose a new message using a wider-format virtual keyboard. Consult Chapter 2 for more on the various keyboards that may show up on your phone.

Sending a photo with an email

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 the video is too long, you won’t be able to send it by email. (You may want to consider other choices for sharing the video, such as the online service Dropbox.) But rather than merely tell you that you can’t send the video — nah, nah, nana nah — Apple provides an editing tool for shortening the sequence into a clip that you will be able to send along. Read Chapter 10 for more on editing videos on the phone.

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 older way to include pictures (or video) in an email is to tap the Photos icon on the Home screen and then find the photo you want to send. Tap the action icon (see the margin), in the lower-left corner of the screen, and then tap the Mail button.

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.

Saving an email message so that you can send it later

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.

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 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.

The number of drafts appears to the right of the Drafts folder, the same way that the number of unread messages appears to the right of other mail folders, such as your inbox.

Now suppose that you’re composing an email but must consult another message. As part of iOS 8, Apple lets you jump between a draft email and a message already in your inbox. From the top of the New Message screen, drag down the draft of the message you’re composing so that the underlying message you need to check out is visible. Add the information and proceed with your outgoing message as usual.

Formatting text in an email

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 rotate the 6 Plus to its side when composing an email, you can press the dedicated B for bolding option on the wider and more expansive keyboard.

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.

Replying to or forwarding an email message

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.

You can edit the Subject line of a reply or a forwarded message or edit the body text of a forwarded message the same way you would edit any other text. It’s usually considered good form to leave the Subject lines alone (with the Re: or Fwd: prefix intact), but you may want to change them sometimes. Now you know that you can.

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.

Settings for sending email

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:

• To hear an alert when you successfully send a message: Tap the Sounds option on the main Settings screen to choose what the Sent Mail alert sounds like, from a Suspense sound to Swoosh (the default). If you want to change other settings, tap the Settings button in the upper-left corner of the screen. If you’re finished setting settings, press the Home button on the front of your iPhone.

  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.

• To add a signature line, phrase, or block of text to every email message you send: Tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars⇒Signature. (You may need to scroll down to see the Signature option.) The default signature is Sent from my iPhone. You can add text before or after it, or delete it and type something else, keeping your signature no longer than four lines max if you want to follow the unwritten rules of netiquette. Your signature is now affixed to the end of all your outgoing email. You can also assign different signatures to each of your mail accounts, a useful feature if you use one account for professional purposes, say, and another account is for more personal stuff.
• To have your iPhone send you a copy of every message you send: Tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then turn on the Always Bcc Myself setting.
• To add an indentation when you forward or reply to a message: As mentioned earlier in the chapter, tap Quote Level and tap or slide the switch from off to on.
• To set the default email account for sending email from outside the Mail app: On the Home screen, tap Settings⇒Mail, Contact, Calendars⇒Default Account. Tap the account you want to use as the default. For example, when you want to email a picture directly from the Photos app, this designated default email account is used. Note that this setting applies only if you have more than one email account on your iPhone.

That’s what you need to know about the settings that apply to sending email.

Setting your message and account settings

This final discussion of Mail involves more settings that deal with your various email accounts.

Checking and viewing email settings

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:

• To specify how often the iPhone checks for new messages: On the Home screen, tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars⇒Fetch New Data. You’re entering the world of fetching and pushing. Check out Figure 12-20 to glance at your options. If your email program supports push and you have it turned on, fresh messages are sent to your iPhone automatically as soon as they reach the server. If you turned off push or your email account doesn’t support it, the iPhone fetches data instead (that is, messages are batched before they are sent). Choices for fetching are Every 15 Minutes, Every 30 Minutes, Hourly, and Manually. Tap the one you prefer, keeping in mind that fetching less frequently has a positive effect on battery life.

  

  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).

• To hear an alert sound when you receive a new message: Tap the Sounds option on the main Settings screen and then turn on the New Mail setting. Again, you can choose from a variety of sound effects. The Ding sound is the default.
• To set the number of lines of each message to be displayed in the message list: On the Home screen, tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars⇒Preview, and then choose a number. Your choices are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 lines of text. The more lines of text you display in the list, the fewer messages you can see at a time without scrolling. Think before you choose 4 or 5.
• To specify whether the iPhone shows the To and Cc labels in message lists: On the Home screen, tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then turn on or off the Show To/Cc Label setting.
• To change swipe options to quickly access features such as Trash, Flag, or Archive: On the Home screen, tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then choose to swipe left or right.
• To turn on or off the Ask before Deleting warning: On the Home screen, tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then turn on or off the Ask before Deleting setting. If this setting is turned on, you need to tap the trashcan icon at the bottom of the screen and then tap Trash Message to confirm the deletion. When the setting is turned off, tapping the trashcan icon deletes the message and you never see a Trash Message option.
• To archive messages rather than delete them: Tap an email account that presents this option — Gmail is one. Next, tap the Account name and then tap Advanced. Under Move Discarded Message Into, tap either Deleted Mailbox or Archive Mailbox so that a check box appears.
• To specify whether the phone will automatically load remote images: Tap Load Remote Images so that the switch shows green. If it’s off, you can still manually load remote images.

Altering account settings

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:

• To stop using an email account: Tap the Settings icon on the Home screen, tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then tap the account name. Tap the Mail switch to turn off the account. Depending on the account, you might also turn off other settings. For example, in Gmail, you can turn off the Calendars, Contacts, and Notes settings but leave Mail turned on.

  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.

• To delete an email account: Tap the Settings icon on the Home screen, tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then tap the account name. Scroll to the bottom and tap Delete Account. You’re given a chance to reconsider by tapping either Delete from My iPhone or Cancel.

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:

• To specify how long until deleted messages are removed permanently from your iPhone: Tap Advanced and then tap Remove. Your choices are Never, After One Day, After One Week, and After One Month. Tap the choice you prefer.
• Send signed and encrypted messages: In an account that has an Advanced setting, tap S/MIME to turn on the setting and then indicate whether a message must be signed or require a certificate, which might be issued by a systems administrator at your job. This setting is under Advanced for a reason.
• To choose whether drafts, sent messages, and deleted messages are stored on your iPhone or on your mail server: Tap Advanced if this option is presented. Then, under the Mailbox Behaviors heading, choose various settings to determine whether you’re storing such messages on the iPhone or on the server. Your options vary according to your email account. If you choose to store any or all of them on the server, you can’t see them unless you have an Internet connection (Wi-Fi or cellular). If you choose to store them on your iPhone, they’re always available, even if you don’t have Internet access.

We strongly recommend that you not change these next two items (again, assuming they are even presented) unless you know exactly what you’re doing and why. If you’re having problems with sending or receiving mail, start by contacting your ISP (Internet service provider), email provider, or corporate IT person or department. Then change these settings only if IT instructs you to do so:

• To reconfigure mail server settings: Tap Host Name, User Name, or Password in the Incoming Mail Server or Outgoing Mail Server section of the account settings screen and make your changes.
• To adjust Use SSL, Authentication, IMAP Path Prefix, or Server Port: Tap Advanced, and then tap the appropriate item and make the necessary changes.

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.