If you have a free email account from Google, AOL, or Yahoo; a MobileMe account (Chapter 13); or a Microsoft Exchange account run by your employer (Chapter 14), then setup on the iPhone is easy.

From the Home screen, tap Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars→Add Account. Tap the colorful logo that corresponds to the kind of account you have (Google, Yahoo, or whatever).

Now you land on the account-information screen. Tap into each of the four blanks and, when the keyboard appears, type your name, email address, account password, and a description (that one’s optional). Tap Save.

Your email account is ready to go!

Those freebie, Web-based accounts are super-easy to set up. But they’re not the whole ball of wax. Millions of people have a more generic email account, perhaps supplied by their employers or Internet providers. They’re generally one of two types:

The iPhone can communicate with both kinds of accounts, with varying degrees of completeness.

If you haven’t opted to have your account-setup information transferred automatically to the iPhone from your Mac or PC, then you can set it up manually on the phone.

From the Home screen, tap Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars→Add Account. Tap Other, tap Add Mail Account, and then enter your name, email address, password, and an optional description. Tap Next.

Apple’s software attempts to figure out which kind of account you have (POP or IMAP) by the email address. If it can’t make that determination, then you arrive at a second screen, where you’re asked for such juicy details as the Host Name for Incoming and Outgoing Mail servers. (This is also where you tap either IMAP or POP, to tell the iPhone what sort of account it’s dealing with.)

If you don’t know this stuff offhand, you’ll have to ask your Internet provider, corporate tech-support person, or next-door teenager to help you.

When you’re finished, tap Save.

If you have more than one email address, then iOS 4 was written for you. For the first time, the iPhone offers a unified Inbox—an option that displays all the incoming messages from all your accounts in a single place. (If you don’t see it—if Mail opened up to some other screen—keep tapping the upper-left button until you do.)

This Mailboxes page has two sections:

If you tap an Inbox’s name, you wind up face-to-face with the list of incoming messages. At first, you see only the subject lines of your messages, plus, in light-gray type, the first few lines of its contents; that way, you can scan through new messages and see if there’s anything important. You can flick your finger to scroll this list, if it’s long. Blue dots indicate messages you haven’t yet opened. Tap a message to read it in all its formatted glory.

Here and there, you may spot another new iOS 4 feature: threaded messages. That’s where several related messages—back-and-forths on the same subject—appear only once, in a single, consolidated Inbox entry. (You’ll know one when you see one, because the number of volleys in this exchange appears at the right side of the message list, like this: ). The idea is to reduce Inbox clutter and help you remember what people were talking about.

To read a normal message in the message list, you just tap it. But when you tap a threaded message, you first open an intermediate screen that lists the messages in the thread. Tap one of those to read, at last, the message itself.

Of course, this also means that to return to the Inbox, you have more backtracking to do (tap the upper-left button twice).

In general, threading is a nice feature, even if it accidentally clumps in a message that has nothing to do with the subject from time to time.

But if it bugs you, you can turn it off. Open Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars, scroll down, and turn off Organize By Thread.

The type size in email messages can be pretty small. Fortunately, you have some great iPhoney enlargement tricks at your disposal. For example:

Drag or flick your finger to scroll through or around the message.

It’s nice to note that links are “live” in email messages. Tap a phone number to call it, a Web address to open it, a YouTube link to watch it, an email address to write to it, a time and date to add it to your calendar, and so on.

To answer a message, tap the Reply/Forward icon () at the bottom of the screen. You’re asked if you want to Reply or Forward; tap Reply. If the message was originally addressed to multiple recipients, then you can send your reply to everyone simultaneously by hitting Reply All instead.

A new message window opens, already addressed. As a courtesy to your correspondents, Mail places the original message at the bottom of the window.

At this point, you can add or delete recipients, edit the Subject line or the original message, and so on. When you’re finished, tap Send.

Instead of replying to the person who sent you a message, you may sometimes want to pass the note on to a third person.

To do so, tap the button at the bottom of the screen. This time, tap Forward.

A new message opens, looking a lot like the one that appears when you reply. You may wish to precede the original message with a comment of your own, like, “Frank: I thought you’d be interested in this joke about your mom.”

Finally, address and send it as you would any outgoing piece of mail.

As noted earlier, some mail accounts let you create filing folders to help manage your messages. Once you’ve opened a message that’s worth keeping, you file it by tapping the button at the bottom of the screen. Up pops the list of your folders (next page, left); tap the one you want.

It’s a snap to delete a message you no longer want, too. If it’s open on the screen before you, simply tap the button at the bottom of the screen. Frankly, it’s worth deleting tons of messages just for the pleasure of watching the animation as they funnel down into that tiny icon, whose lid pops open and shut accordingly (facing page, right).

You can also delete a message from the message list—the Inbox, for example. Just swipe your finger across the message listing, in either direction. (It doesn’t have to be an especially broad swipe.) The red Delete button appears; tap it to confirm, or tap anywhere else if you change your mind.

There’s a long way to delete messages from the list, too, as described below. But for single messages, the finger-swipe method is much more fun.

You can also file or delete a bunch of messages at once. In the message list, tap Edit. A dot appears beside each message title. You can tap as many of these circles as you like, scrolling as necessary, adding a with each touch.

Finally, when you’ve selected all the messages in question, tap either Delete or Move. (The number in parentheses shows how many you’ve selected).

If you tap Move, you’re shown the folder list so you can say where you want them moved. If you tap Delete, the messages disappear.

When you get a message from someone new who’s worth adding to your iPhone’s Contacts address book, tap the blue, oval-shaped email address (where it says “From:”). You’re offered two buttons: Create New Contact and Add to Existing Contact. Use the second button to add an email address to an existing person’s “card.”

The Mail program downloads and displays the icons for any kind of attachment—but it can open only documents from Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Apple iWork (Pages, Keynote, Numbers), PDF, text, RTF, .vcf, graphics, and un-copy-protected audio and video files.

Just scroll down, tap the attachment’s icon, wait a moment for downloading, and then marvel as the document opens up, full-screen. You can zoom in and zoom out, flick, rotate the phone 90 degrees, and scroll just as though it’s a Web page or photo.

When you’re finished admiring the attachment, tap Message (top-left corner) to return to the original email message.

One of the great joys of iPhone mail is its ability to display graphics that the sender embedded right in the message. And one of the great joys of iOS 4 is its flexibility in handling these graphics. Just hold your finger still on the picture. You’re offered two choices:

When your computer’s screen measures only 3 1/2 inches diagonally, there’s not a lot of extra space. So Apple designed Mail to conceal the details that you might need only occasionally. They reappear, naturally enough, when you tap Details in the upper-right corner of a message.

Now you get to see a few more details about the message. For instance:

Tap Hide to collapse these details.

Once you’ve had a good look at a message and processed it to your satisfaction, you can move on to the next (or previous) message in the list by tapping the or button in the upper-right corner.

Or you can tap the button in the upper-left corner to return to the Inbox (or whatever mailbox you’re in).

Praise be—there’s a Search box in Mail. It’s hiding above the top of every mail list, like your Inbox. To see it, scroll up, or just tap the status strip at the top of the screen.

Tap inside the Search box to make the keyboard appear. As you type, Mail hides all but the matching messages; tap one of the results to open it. (Note, however, that the iPhone doesn’t search the body of your messages—it can search only the From, To, or Subject lines, or all three at once. Bummer.)

At the very bottom, you may see a link called Continue Search on Server. It doesn’t appear for all email accounts, but it’s there when you’re in MobileMe, Gmail, and most other IMAP accounts. It’s intended to let you continue your To/From/Subject line search on email that’s not on your iPhone—that’s still out there on the Internet, usually because it’s so old that it’s scrolled off your phone. If the message you seek hasn’t appeared, Continue Search on Server is worth a try.

A signature is a bit of text that gets stamped at the bottom of your outgoing email messages. It can be your name, a postal address, or a pithy quote.

Unless you intervene, the iPhone stamps “Sent from my iPhone” at the bottom of every message. You may be just fine with that, or you may consider it the equivalent of gloating (or free advertising for Apple). In any case, you can change the signature if you want to.

From the Home screen, tap Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars→Signature. The Signature text window appears, complete with keyboard, so you can compose the signature you want.

Mail is an awfully full-fledged email program for a phone. But compared with a desktop email program, it’s really only half-fledged. You can’t send file attachments, can’t create mail rules—and can’t screen out spam.

Spam, the junk mail that makes up more than 80 percent of email, is only getting worse. So how are you supposed to keep it off your iPhone?

The following solution will take 15 minutes to set up, but it will make you very happy in the long run.

Suppose your regular email address is [email protected].

As you complete the setup process in Gmail, you’ll see a message that says: “You can now retrieve mail from this account. Would you also like to be able to send mail as [email protected]?”

If you click “Yes, I want to be able to send mail as [your real email address],” your iPhone should not only receive spam-filtered mail from your main account—but when you reply, your main email address also will be the return address, and not your Gmail address. In theory, at least.

This feature turns Gmail into a convenient, automatic, behind-the-scenes spam filter for your iPhone that leaves little trace of its involvement. (You can always change the outgoing account on a per-message basis; see Writing Messages.) In the meantime, at least all mail sent to your main address ([email protected]) will come to your iPhone prefiltered.

And as an added, added bonus, you can check your [email protected] email from any computer that has a Web browser—at Gmail.com.

In Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars→Show (next page, left), you can specify how many messages you want to appear in the list before scrolling off the screen: 25, 50, 200, whatever.

It’s only a false sense of being on top of things—you can always tap the Load 25 More Messages button to retrieve the next batch—but at least you’ll never have a 2,000-message Inbox.

As you may have noticed, the messages in your Inbox are listed with the Subject line in bold type and a couple of lines, in light-gray text, that preview the message itself.

You can control how many lines of the light-gray preview text show up here. From the Home screen, tap Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars→Preview. Choosing None means you fit a lot more message titles on each screen without scrolling; choosing 5 Lines shows you a lot of each message, but means you’ll have to do more scrolling.

The iPhone can display a little or logo on each message in your Inbox. At a glance, it helps you identify which messages are actually intended for you. Messages without those logos are probably spam, newsletters, mailing lists, or other messages that weren’t specifically addressed to you.

To turn on these little badges, visit Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars and turn on Show To/CC Label. There’s no downside to using this feature.

If you have more than one email account, you might want to deactivate one for a while—for example, to accommodate your travel schedule. You can also delete an account.

Visit Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars. In the list of accounts, tap the one you want. At the top of the screen, you see the On/Off switch, which makes an account dormant. And at the bottom, you see the Delete Account button.