8. Communicating with Email, Messaging, and Twitter
Next, we look at how to configure and use the Mail program on your iPad to correspond using email and how to use the Messaging and Twitter apps to send and receive messages.
→ Configuring Your iPad for Email
→ Deleting and Moving Messages
→ Configuring How Email Is Received
Now that you have an iPad with a battery that seems to last forever, you have no excuse for not replying to emails. You need to be comfortable using the built-in Mail app that enables you to connect with your home or work email using standard protocols such as POP and IMAP. You can even connect with more proprietary systems such as AOL, Exchange, and Yahoo! You can also send messages to your friends using Apple’s iMessage system or Twitter.
Configuring Your iPad for Email
It’s easy to set up your email if you use one of the popular email services like iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or Microsoft. But if you use another kind of service, such as the email given to you by your local ISP, you need to collect some information to set things up. Here is a list of information you need to set up your iPad for a basic email account
• Email Address
• Account Type (POP or IMAP)
• Incoming Mail Server Address
• Incoming Mail User ID
• Incoming Mail Password
• Outgoing Mail Server Address
• Outgoing Mail User ID
• Outgoing Mail Password
If you are using iCloud, Gmail, or any of the other services listed on the Add Account screen, all you need to do is enter your email address and password. Your iPad will set up the account from those two pieces of information. But if you are using another type of email account, you need to enter several details about your account.
Tap the Settings icon on your Home screen.
Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
Tap Add Account.
If you have an iCloud, Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, or Hotmail account, tap the corresponding button. From there, simply enter your user ID and password information, and your iPad figures out the rest. You can skip the rest of the steps!
Tap Other if you have a traditional POP or IMAP account from work, your Internet providers, or a traditional hosting company.
Tap in the Name field and enter your name.
Tap in the Address field and enter your email address.
Tap in the Password field and enter your password.
The Description field should automatically fill with a copy of your email address. Keep it or use another description for the account.
Tap Next.
Tap IMAP or POP as the email account type.
Tap in the Incoming Mail Server, Host Name field and enter your email host’s address.
Tap in the Incoming Mail Server, User Name field and enter your user name.
Tap in the Incoming Mail Server, Password field and enter your password.
Repeat the previous three steps for Outgoing Mail Server.
Tap Next, and the verification process, which can take up to a minute, begins.
What if the Settings Won’t Verify?
If your settings fail to verify, you need to double-check all the information you entered. When something is wrong, it often comes down to a single character being mistyped in one of these fields. For instance, some email systems expect yourname+example.com as the user ID if your email address is [email protected]. Be careful you don’t miss little things like that.
Reading Your Email
You use the Mail app to read your email, which is much easier to navigate and type with your iPad turned horizontally. Let’s start by reading some email.
Tap the Mail app icon on the Home screen.
On the left, you see a list of incoming mail. On the right, you see the selected message.
Tap a message in the list to view it.
If you want to check for new mail, drag the list of messages down and release. It will spring back up and ask the server to see if there are new messages.
Tap the name or email address of the sender.
Tap Create New Contact to add the sender to your contacts.
Tap Add to Existing Contact to add the email address to a contact you already have in your Contacts app.
Tap the Folder button at the top of the message.
Tap a folder to move the current message to that folder.
Tap the Trash button at the top of the message to send the message directly to the Trash folder.
Tap the arrow button at the top of the message to reply or forward the message.
Multiple Inboxes
If you have more than one email account, you can choose to look at each inbox individually or a single unified inbox that includes messages from all accounts. Just tap the Mailboxes button at the upper-left corner of the screen and choose All Inboxes. You can also choose to look at the inbox of a single account, or dig down into any folder of an account.
How Do You Create Folders?
For most email accounts—particularly IMAP, Gmail, and iCloud accounts—you can create folders using the Mail app. Use the back arrow at the upper-left corner of Mail and back out to the list of inboxes and accounts. Choose an account. Then tap the Edit button, and you’ll see a New Mailbox button at the bottom of the screen.
VIPs
You can make a contact a VIP when you select the sender’s name in an incoming email. Then, their messages will continue to appear in your inbox as normal, but they will also appear in the VIP inbox. So if you get a lot of email and want to occasionally focus only on a few very important people instead of everyone, choose your VIP inbox rather than your inbox.
If you are using VIPs with your iCloud email accounts, you’ll see the same VIPs for your Mac and other iOS devices using that iCloud account.
Composing a New Message
Whether you compose a new message or reply to one you received, the process is similar. Let’s take a look at composing one from scratch.
In the Mail app, tap the Compose button.
Enter a To: address.
Alternatively, tap the + button to bring up a list of contacts, and choose from there.
Tap in the Subject field and type a subject for the email.
Siri: Sending Email
You can use Siri to send email by asking it to “send an email to” and the name of the recipient. It will ask you for a subject and a body to the message, and then display it. You can choose to send it or cancel.
Tap below the subject field in the body of the email, and type your message.
Tap the Send button.
You can copy and paste inside a Mail message just like you can inside of any text entry area on your iPad. But you can also paste in images! Just copy an image from any source—Photos app, Safari, and so on. Then tap in the message body and select Paste. You can paste in more than one image as well.
Creating a Signature
You can create a signature that appears below your messages automatically. You do this in the Settings app.
In the Settings app, choose Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
Tap Signature, which is way down in the list on the right.
If you have more than one email account set up, you can choose to have one signature for all accounts or a different signature for each account.
Type a signature in one of the signature text fields. You don’t need to do anything to save the signature. You can tap the Home button on your iPad to exit Settings if you like.
Case-By-Case Signatures
You can have only one signature, even if you have multiple email accounts on your iPad. But the signature is placed in the editable area of the message composition field, so you can edit it like the rest of your message.
Deleting and Moving Messages
While viewing a message, you can simply tap the Trash Can icon and move it to the trash. You can also move a group of messages to a folder or the trash.
In the Mail app, go to any mailbox and any subfolder, such as your Inbox.
Tap the Edit button.
Tap the circles next to each message to select them.
They will be added to the middle of the screen in a neat stack.
Tap the Trash button to delete the selected messages.
Tap the Move button, and the left side of the screen changes to a list of folders. You can select one to move all the messages to that folder.
Tap the Cancel button to exit without deleting or moving any messages.
Where’s the Trash?
If you are just deleting the single message that you happen to be viewing, you can tap the trashcan icon at the top. But sometimes that icon isn’t there. Instead, you may see an icon that looks like a file box. This is an Archive button. Some email services, like Gmail, insist that you archive your email instead of deleting it. To facilitate this, they provide a nearly infinite amount of storage space, so you might as well use that Archive button.
Your iPad has no built-in spam filter. Fortunately, most email servers filter out spam at the server level. Using a raw POP or IMAP account from an ISP might mean you don’t have any server-side spam filtering, unfortunately. But using an account at a service such as Gmail means that you get spam filtering on the server and junk mail automatically goes to the Junk folder, not your Inbox.
Searching Email
You can also search your messages using the Mail app.
In the Mail app, from a mailbox view, tap in the Search field.
Type a search term.
Select a message to view from the search results.
Tap the keyboard hide key at the bottom right to hide the keyboard.
Tap Cancel to exit the search and return to the mailbox you were previously viewing.
Search What?
Searches work on From, To, Subject fields and the body of the message. However, this only works on messages stored on your iPad. If you are using a server-based email solution, such as IMAP, iCloud, Gmail, and so on, you may not get all the results you expect.
Configuring How Email Is Received
You have more settings for email beyond the basic account setup. You can decide how you want to receive email, using either push delivery (iCloud, IMAP, and Microsoft Exchange) or fetch delivery (all other email accounts).
Go to the Settings app and tap on Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
Tap Fetch New Data.
Turn on Push to use push email reception, if you use email accounts that can send email via push. Push means that the email servers alert your iPad when new mail arrives, instead of waiting for your iPad to check for new mail every so often.
Otherwise, select how often you want your iPad to go out to the server and fetch email.
Tap one of your email accounts to customize the settings for that particular account.
For each account you can set your preferences to Fetch, Manual, or Push if available for that email account.
Push Settings
The two choices for most email accounts are Fetch and Manual. If you have a push account, such as iCloud, you have three choices: Push, Fetch, and Manual. You can switch a Push account to Fetch or Manual if you prefer. You might want to use Manual if you are concerned about bandwidth, like when traveling internationally and only want to check email when using Wi-Fi.
Siri: Checking Email
You can ask Siri for a quick list of new email messages by saying “check my email.” You’ll get a list from within the Siri interface, and you can tap on a message to read it in the Mail app.
More Email Settings
You can change even more email settings in the Settings app. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Tap Preview to choose how many lines of message preview to show when stacking messages up in the list view.
Turn Show To/Cc Label on to view “To” or “Cc” in each email listed so that you know if you were the primary recipient or someone who was just copied on an email to someone else.
Turn Ask Before Deleting on to require a confirmation when you tap the trash can button in Mail.
Turn Load Remote Images off so that images referenced in an mail, but stored on a remote server, are not shown in the message body.
To group replies to a message under the original message, select Organize By Thread. This is handy when you subscribe to email discussion lists.
Turn Always Bcc Myself on if you want to get a copy of every email you send so that later you can move your copies of emails to your Sent folder on your computer. This might be a good idea if you are using an older email system. Modern email systems like iCloud and Gmail should save your sent messages to the server just like other messages.
Choose whether to indent the quoted text from the original email when replying to a message.
Tap Default Account to determine which account is used to send email by default if you have more than one account set up on your iPad.
In most apps from which you send emails, you can type a message and also change the account you use to send the email. To do this, tap on the email address shown next to From: and you get a list of all your accounts, including alternate email addresses for each account.
Why Not Show Remote Images?
The main reason to not show remote images is bandwidth. If you get an email that has 15 images referenced in it, you need to download a lot of data, and it takes a while for that email to show up completely. However, remote images are often used as ways to indicate whether you have opened and looked at messages. So, turning this off might break some statistics and receipt functionality expected from the sender.
You can use Siri to send email through a series of responses. First, activate Siri and say something like “Send an email to John.” You are asked for the subject of the message. After dictating that, you are asked for the message text. Then, you are shown the message to review it. You are then asked “Ready to send it?” If you respond “yes,” Siri sends the email. Otherwise, respond “no” to cancel.
Setting Up Messaging
Even though your iPad isn’t a phone, you can send text messages. The catch is that you can only message others who are also using Apple’s iMessage system. This would include anyone using iOS 5 or newer with an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, as long as they have signed up for the free service. Mac users can also send messages with the iMessage system.
Launch the Messages app.
If this is your first time, you need to enter your Apple ID and password. Otherwise, you can go to step 3.
Tap Sign In.
You can further customize how you send and receive messages in the Settings app. Go to the Settings app and choose Messages.
If you turn this option on, when someone sends you a message they will also get an indication when you have viewed the message. This can save you from having to send simple “OK” messages in response.
You can use any valid email address that you own for Messages, even if it is not the same as your Apple ID email address. You can control which email addresses can be used to find you, adding more and removing others.
Apple’s iMessage system can include a subject line along with the message, though most people don’t use this.
Tap Blocked to add email addresses to block so individuals cannot send you messages.
Conversing with Messages
After you have set up an account with Messages, you can quickly and easily send messages to others. The next time you launch Messages, you will be taken directly to the main screen.
Tap the New Message button at the top of the screen.
In a new message, tap in the To field and enter the email address of the recipient. Note that they should already be signed up for iMessage or you will not be able to send them anything. Some iPhone users may use their phone number as their iMessage ID instead of, or in addition to, their email address. As long as the phone number is tied to an iMessage account, you can still converse with them using Messages on your iPad.
Tap the text field above the keyboard to type your message.
If you want to include a picture with your message, tap the camera button. This allows you to choose a picture from your photo library, or take a new one with your iPad’s camera.
Tap Send to send your message.
You will see the conversation as a series of talk bubbles. Yours will appear on the right.
When your friend responds, you will see their talk bubbles as well.
A list of conversations appears on the left. You can have many going on at the same time, or use this list to look at old conversations.
Tap the Compose button to start a new conversation.
Tap Edit to access buttons to delete old conversations.
Tap on the Contact button to do various tasks such as adding them to your contacts, or starting a FaceTime video chat.
Tap and hold on any message to bring up more options.
Use the More button to bring up options like selecting and deleting individual messages in the conversation.
Siri: Sending Messages
You can use Siri to send messages. Simply tell Siri something like “Send a text message to Gary” and Siri will respond by asking you what you want to say in your message. You can review the message before it is sent for a truly hands-free operation. When you get a message, you can also ask Siri to “Read me that message” and you can listen to the message without ever glancing at your iPad’s screen.
Setting Up Twitter
Another way to message is to use the popular service Twitter. But instead of a private conversation, Twitter is all about telling the world what you are up to. If you already have a Twitter account, you can use the official Twitter app that comes with your iPad. Otherwise, you can set up a new account.
If you don’t already have it, install the Twitter app by going to Settings and tapping Twitter on the left side. Launch the Twitter app from the Home screen.
If you already have an account, tap Sign In.
If you need to create a Twitter account, you can do so here by tapping Sign Up. Then enter the required information for a new account.
Enter your Twitter Username and Password.
Tap Sign In.
Following People on Twitter
Even if you don’t tweet much yourself, you can have fun with Twitter by following others. You can even learn things and stay informed. The key is to figure out who you want to follow and then add them.
With the Twitter app open, tap the Search button.
Type in the name or Twitter handle of the person you want to follow. You can also use terms that describe them, like which website or company they are associated with.
Tap the profile that matches your search, and then use the picture to help identify the right person.
Tap the Follow button to add them to the list of people you follow.
Who to Follow?
This depends on what you want from Twitter. If you just want to know what your friends are up to, then only follow your friends. If you want to hear what celebrities have to say, then search for some of your favorites. You can also search for professional and industry experts to learn more and stay informed. And don’t limit your search to people. Local and worldwide news publications and organizations also have Twitter feeds.
How to Tweet
Thinking about adding your voice to the conversation? You can send a tweet easily with the Twitter app.
With the Twitter app open, tap the Compose button.
Enter the text of your tweet. It must be 140 characters or less.
You can add a photo or video to your tweet. This will upload the image to the service you have selected in your Twitter account and put a link to the file in the tweet.
You can add your GPS location to the tweet.
Tap Tweet.
Siri: Tweeting
You can send a tweet with Siri simply by asking it to “send a tweet.” You will then be prompted to speak the message. Like with sending email, you can review and confirm the message before it is sent.