THANKS TO ITS WIFI or Wi-Fi + Cellular connectivity, the iPad can grab your email out of thin air. You can read, write, and send messages to stay in the digital loop of your life.

But to get messages flowing into your iPad, you need to set up your email accounts so your tablet knows where on the Internet to look for your mail.

Copy your Desktop Mail Settings Using iTunes

You get email on your desktop or laptop computer, right? If you use a dedicated program like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, you can copy your account settings over to your iPad without having to fiddle with server addresses and other arcane tech matters.

To do that, connect your iPad to your computer (either by Wi-Fi Sync or USB cable), click its icon in iTunes, and then click the Info tab on the next screen. Scroll down and turn on the Sync Mail Accounts checkbox. Next, under “Sync selected mail accounts,” put a check in the box next to the accounts you want to use on your iPad. Click Apply or Sync to copy the settings—but not your computer-based messages—over to your iPad, where you can now check for new mail.

Tip

Need another email address? You can get one from Apple when you sign up for a free iCloud account (Chapter 17). Your address will be [your name]@icloud.com. People who formerly had MobileMe accounts get a [your name]@me.com address as well.

Set Up Mail Accounts on the iPad

To manually set up an email account, first tap the Mail app on the iPad’s Home screen. If you use iCloud (Set Up iCloud on Your iPad), Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail, tap the appropriate icon on the next screen. If not, tap Other. Then:

1. On the next screen, type in your name, email address, password, and a nickname the iPad will use to identify your account (“Personal Gmail,” say). If you tapped Other, be prepared to peek at the account settings in your desktop computer’s mail program or to type in the settings you got from your Internet service provider (ISP) when you signed up for your account. You’ll need your user name, password, and the addresses of your ISP’s incoming and outgoing mail servers (which usually look something like mail.myserver.com and smtp.myserver.com, respectively).

   

   If you don’t know the server addresses off the top of your head and can’t find the paperwork from your ISP, check the support area of its website for “email configuration settings” or “email server addresses.” (See POP3 and IMAP Accounts on the iPad for detailed steps on configuring ISP email.)

2. Click Save, and the mail program goes out and gets your new messages. Repeat the process if you have more than one account. (You can add more accounts later at Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars→Add Account.)

If you do have more than one email account, the iPad offers a unified Inbox at the top of the Mailboxes panel, as shown on the right. This means you can see all your new messages for every account just by tapping All Inboxes.

Of course, you can check each Inbox individually, too, by tapping the email account’s nickname. To see other folders for that account, like Sent, Trash, and Drafts, flick down to Accounts, tap a name, and then tap the name of the mailbox you want to see.

ONCE YOU SET UP your accounts, the iPad’s email program works pretty much like any other: You read messages, write messages, and send messages. But instead of popping open overlapping windows for each message you read and compose, the iPad keeps things in tight formation.

You don’t have to click a thing to see an account’s inbox on the left side of the screen and an open message displayed alongside it: Just hold your iPad horizontally. Your inbox appears as a list of messages, showing the sender’s name, the email’s subject, and a two-line preview of each message (below). To check for new messages, place your finger on the Inbox column and pull down. A search box lets you scan your mail for keywords. Here are a few other tips for iPad Mail:

If you find the Inbox screen a little too busy with previews and panes, hold the iPad vertically. This 90-degree move reorients the screen—all the background boxes disappear, and the one message you need to deal with sits front and center, filling the screen, with a toolbar on top.

This streamlined toolbar doesn’t have a lot of room for labels, so here’s a guide to the runes, generally moving from left to right along the screen:

The Mail app condenses email addresses down to just names in a blue oval. To see the person’s actual return address, tap the name to open the Sender info box. That same box gives you the option to send a text message (Send Messages) or to start a FaceTime chat (Make Video Calls with FaceTime).

SO HOW DO YOU read your mail once you get your accounts all set up? Like this:

Use Information in Mail Messages

Ever notice how a lot of email messages involve setting up dinner dates, appointments, meetings, and other gatherings that use addresses and people’s contact info? The Mail app knows this—and is ready to do something about it.

Say you get an email suggesting dinner at a new restaurant—with the address helpfully pasted in the message. If it’s an unfamiliar location, press down on the address. The iPad recognizes this as a street address and turns it into a link. Tap it, and a box pops up offering four options—including the ability to see the address highlighted in the iPad’s Maps program. Now that’s service!

The other helpful options include:

• Add to Contacts. If your sender includes personal information in a message, like a name, address, or phone number, you can add him or her to your Contacts list with a tap. When you choose this option, the iPad asks if you want to create a new contact using the included info or add that info to an existing file in your Contacts app (Use Information in Mail Messages).

• Copy. Need to move this information into another message or program? Select Copy and, when you get to the destination program, hold your finger down and select Paste from the pop-up menu.

• Event. If the message has an underlined date, time, or phrase (“dinner tomorrow”), press and hold that bit of text. You get menu options to create a new event, highlight the date in the iPad’s Calendar app, or copy the text.

Now that you’ve mastered reading email, turn the page to find out how to write and send messages.

WHEN YOU’RE READY TO write—or write back—the iPad is there for you. To start from scratch with a new message, tap at the top of the screen. If you’re replying to (or forwarding) a message, tap and select Reply, Reply All, or Forward. Either way, you create a new message.

Add Picture and Video Attachments to Mail Messages

One of the more popular uses of email (besides the sending and unfortunate receiving of spam) is as a delivery mechanism for pictures and videos. Images of grandkids, puppies, and kittens fill the Internet. If the photo or video is in your iPad’s Photos app, you can mail it. (See Chapter 16 for more on shooting, syncing, and storing photos on your iPad. Chapter 15 tells you how to have the same kind of fun with videos.)

For iPads running iOS 5 and later, bop into the Photos app from the Home screen and tap open the album containing the image or images you want to send. Tap at the top of the screen and then tap the photos you want to mail to select them. Finally, tap the Share button to create a new message with the images attached.

If you have iOS 6, there’s a much easier way to stick a photo on an outgoing message—even if you’ve already started the message. With the message open, press your finger on the screen in the place where you want to add the video or photo. A menu like the one below appears. Tap “Insert Photo or Video.”

A box with your Camera Roll and other photo albums appears. To select a photo or video you’ve shot with your iPad, tap Camera Roll, and then tap the thumbnail of the image or clip you want to attach. Confirm this is the item you want and tap the Use button in the top-right corner to attach it.

Once you have an image (or images) attached to a message, you can adjust the size of the attachments if you don’t want to send giant files. Just tap Images in the message header. The Image Size options appear (shown on the opposite page) so you can choose a file size (Small, Medium, Large, or Actual Size). Tap one, finish writing your message, and then tap Send to fire it off.

If you already have a message started, you can paste in a pic; see Cut, Copy, Paste, and Replace Text.

THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF the iPad’s mail program was perfectly fine for composing, sending, and receiving mail. As email programs go, though, it was a little bland in that plain-text sort of way. Luckily, in iOS 5 and later, things have changed for the better.

You can now dress up your messages with bold, italic, or underlined text. This is helpful when you want to emphasize certain words in your message. Using type styles, you can also make long list-y things (like outlines) easier to read by using bolded and underlined text to break sections into subsections.

To format a message you’re composing, tap the word you want to jazz up, and then tap Select to highlight it. To format a phrase, tap a word in it, choose Select, and then drag the blue dots in either direction to highlight the words you want to include. To format an entire message (and really annoy your recipients), select a word and then tap Select All. Once you have your text selected, tap the highlighted area.

A long menu offering a variety of mail-editing commands appears. Your choices are Cut | Copy | Paste | Suggest… | B/U | Define | Insert Photo or Video | Quote Level. Tap the B/U option toward the center of the menu bar to reveal the full formatting menu, with the bold, italics, and underline options at your fingertips.

Tap the style you want. You can use more than one at a time, so feel free to knock yourself out with underlined bold italic text. Tap the message body to go back to your note.

Remember that Quote Level option at the end of the first menu bar? Tap it to increase or decrease the indentation of text you select. For example, to set off a paragraph in a message you’re writing, highlight the text with the selection methods described above, tap in the pop-up menu bar, and then tap Quote Level. Here, you can select Increase to add levels of indentation—and change the color of the text with the first three indents. Tap Decrease to remove the indents on the selected text, level by level.

EMAIL IS A GREAT way to exchange information, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed with finding the messages you want among the spam, newsletters, and other stuff in your mailbox. Wouldn’t it be great if the iPad would notify you when someone you want to hear from zaps you a note?

In iOS 6, this dream comes true. Thanks to the VIP Mailbox feature baked into the latest version of the iPad’s Mail app, you can set up a list of all the important people in your life—spouse, offspring, parents, business partners, Amazon customer service—and have the iPad collect those messages in the VIP mailbox and notify you (Use Notifications) when they arrive.

Here’s how to set up a VIP Mailbox:

Now, whenever one of your VIPs sends you a message, it arrives in style and with a star (). To add new VIPs to your list, tap in the VIP Inbox, and then tap Add VIP on the next screen. You can remove people by tapping open the VIP list, hitting the Edit button, and then tapping next to The Unworthy.

AS YOU BROWSE YOUR list of new mail, you may see those types of messages. You know, the ones you need to reply to at some point but can’t deal with right now—though you don’t want to forget about them, either.

The Mail app gives you a couple of ways to defer your attention. You can flag certain messages, which makes them stand out in the Inbox with a snappy orange flag. Or you can mark messages as unread, which restores their blue “unread” dot and makes them seem like new messages all over again, sure to catch your eye when you finally have time to sit down and craft a reply. Here’s what to do for:

If you already have a message flagged and you hit the Flag/Mark menu, you get the option to unflag the item and remove its Marker of Importance. Likewise, if you have mail you haven’t read—and you don’t want to read—the menu gives you a “Mark as Read” option. Tapping it whacks the blue “unread” dot () from your message so it sinks back into the pile of mail you’ve already read.

The Flagged Mailbox

Those snappy orange flags do a good job of making those deal-with-me-later messages stand out in your mailbox, but what if you have a ton of messages in your Inbox—do you really want to scroll up and down the list looking for that one flag in the bunch? Or maybe you have multiple mail accounts and can’t remember where you planted the flag about that upcoming meeting.

In iOS 6, the iPad gives your flagged messages a whole mailbox of their own. It’s like a To Do List for messages that need responses.

You don’t see the Flagged mailbox (circled below) until you stick that first flag on a message. But once you do, it pops up proudly in your iPad’s Inbox panel, right under your VIP list (Set Up a VIP Mailbox). It even displays the number of messages in the box, so you know how much coffee to get before you settle down to reply.

When you unflag or delete the last message in the list, the Flagged mailbox disappears from view—only to return when you let your mail flag fly once again.

EMAIL CAN PILE UP quickly, especially if you have several accounts funneling mail into your tablet. If you find yourself splashing around in a rising tide of mailbox flotsam, here are a few things you can do to get your mail back under control:

LIKE MOST PROGRAMS, THE iPad’s mail app comes with standard settings for things like the size of the text that appears on-screen. If you don’t like the way the type looks or you want to tweak the program in other ways (like how many lines of a message appear in the Inbox preview), take a trip to Home→Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars. From here, you can:

DESPITE THE FACT THAT you can get your messages on your iPad through its dedicated Mail app, that’s not the only way to monitor your inbox. As you may remember from the last chapter, the iPad has a nice, sturdy web browser. With it, you can check web-based email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail/Outlook.com, and so on) by logging in through Safari. The beauty of webmail is that you can manage your email from whatever Internet-ready device you happen to be using that day.

Depending on the email service you use, you may find that it offers a mobile version of your mailbox when you log in through the iPad’s browser, like the Outlook.com mailbox shown here. Some services (like Google) even have their own free apps in the App Store, designed to make it easier to check mail, news, and other features on your iPad. Run a search in the App Store for your service.

WEB-BASED MAIL—ESPECIALLY IF IT’S free—works for many people. But millions of others don’t use it, perhaps because they have accounts from their Internet service providers, use employer-provided accounts, or worry about privacy and security. These mail accounts are typically one of two types:

No matter which kind of account you have, the iPad will work with it. You just need to have all the account information on hand. Syncing your mail accounts with iTunes (described on Set Up an Email Account (or Two)) is one way to get each type of account set up correctly on the iPad. If you skipped that step, you can do it the old-fashioned, manual way.

Here’s how you manually add that account to the Mail app:

If all the information you tapped in was correct, your account should be configured, and the iPad should be fetching your messages now.

THANKS TO APPLE’S IMESSAGE service and its Messages app in iOS 5 and later, iPad owners now have a way to send unlimited, free text messages, photos, videos, and more to people who are also running Messages on their iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches. There’s even a version for Mac OS X Lion (and later). And the iMessage service works over a WiFi, 4G, or 3G connection. Setting up Messages takes just a few steps:

Your previous Messages appear in a list on the left side of the screen, and you can restart a conversation by tapping one open. Here’s what the more common icons on the Messages screen mean:

Emoticons—those happy faces and other icons used in text messages—also work with Messages. The iPad includes an emoticon font called Emoji that lets you accent notes with graphics. To use the font, you first have to assign it to a keyboard—see Use an International or Emoji Keyboard. Once you do, tap on the keyboard, select the Emoji font, and then add some pixelated emotion () to your notes.

TWITTER, FOR THOSE WHO haven’t been paying attention the past few years, is a “microblogging” service—it lets you update friends about your activities and musings. Millions of people use it to report what they see or feel, check for public announcements, and share links to photos and web pages. You have 140 typed characters per message to express your thoughts. And it’s free.

If you already have a Twitter account—and use it frequently to keep up with the world and your friends—get ready to let out a joyous virtual whoop, because the iPad lets you tweet (post updates) directly from many iPad apps, including Safari, Maps, YouTube, Camera, and Photos. Just log into your existing Twitter account at Home→Settings→Twitter. (Facebook works the same way in iOS 6.)

Technically, Twitter is not a built-in app, but so many iPad programs offer a tweet option that it’s best covered here. To get the full Twitter experience, where you can not only tweet from apps, but also read others’ posts and reactions to the things you share, you can install or activate the full Twitter app right from the iPad’s Settings screen:

So now that you have Twitter installed and your personal Twitter account set up, what do you do with it on your iPad? If you’re an experienced Twitter user, you’ve probably already put this book down and gone off to post a few tweets to your pals. If you’re brand-new to Twitter, read on.

First, you need to find some people on Twitter who you’d like to hear from on a regular basis. In Twitter lingo, that means you want to follow, or subscribe to, these Twitter users. They can be friends, celebrities, news organizations, government offices, or anybody else who signed up for Twitter. Once you elect to follow someone (or some group), Twitter sends you their updates as they post them. Collectively, Twitter calls these updates a timeline. To follow a Twitterer, you need to know the person or organization’s Twitter account name.

One way to find and follow someone is to tap the Search icon () on the left side of the screen, type in the person’s Twitter name or a topic you’re interested in, and hit the Search button on the keyboard. In the results list, tap the profile photo of the person or group that interests you. This expands that person’s (or group’s) profile page so you can find out more. Tap the Follow button to add that person’s or group’s Twitter posts to your timeline. (You can find out more about using Twitter at http://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics.)

Other people can sign up to follow your Twitter account as well, so it’s good to post a few messages here and there for your subscribers. To fire off tweets from the Twitter app, tap in the lower-left corner, compose a thought, and then tap Send in the upper-right corner. Your message soon appears in the timelines of all your followers.

The Twitter app has a row of other icons along the left side of the screen. Tap the house-shaped Home icon to flick down the list to see all the recent posts from people you follow. Tap a post to pop it out to a larger size for better readability. If someone tweets a web link, tap the URL to see the page on a new screen; you can see photos attached to tweets by tapping the post to expand it.

Tap the Connect (@) icon to see tweets that mention you by your Twitter handle, the Discover icon (#) to see posts Twitter thinks you may find interesting based on who you follow, and the little head icon to edit your Twitter profile page.

Want to tweet right from apps that support Twitter (like the ones mentioned on the previous page)? Just tap to see if Tweet is an option in the drop-down menu. You’ll find yourself sharing all sorts of things with the class.