Reading email on a phone or tablet
These instructions are for setting up to send and receive email on an iPhone.
Please note that the instructions were originally written in 2011/2012 and they can vary depending on the iPhone software level. The instructions are almost identical for an iPad. Other phones or tablets will probably be similar, but we can’t advise in any detail on those.
The information you need and have to enter is just about the same as for setting up email on a laptop or desktop computer. You can read that in Setting up your mail package. All that’s really different is the screens you use to enter that information.
Note that we can send you the values to use for the email address, POP, SMTP, account name and password if you haven’t kept them from when you set up mail on your computer
Select the Settings panel and then tap ‘Mail, Contacts, Calendars’.
Tap ‘Add Account’, and choose ‘Other’ from the list. Tap ‘Add Mail Account’.
Complete Name, Address, Password and Description. Then tap ‘Next’.
Select IMAP as the mail protocol (this is usually the default)
The incoming mail server hostname is in the format of mail.xxxxx.com (where xxxxx is your domain name)
The incoming mail server username is usually your email address.
The outgoing mail server hostname is the same as the incoming one.
The username and password for this are the same as you used above.
Tap ‘Next’
The phone will then display ‘Verifying’ for quite some time.
If you get any type of certificate error, just tap ‘Proceed’.
When it finally completes, tap ‘Save’ and you’ll see ‘Account Added’
If you now go back to the main iPhone menu, you can tap ‘Mail’ and read the emails that are on the server.
More information – please read these other useful notes
The IMAP service shows a view of the emails but it leaves them on the server. You can read them, reply to them and delete them. Any that you leave on the server will still be there when you return to your computer and read them in using the normal POP facility. Usually, you allow the POP facility to clear the emails once you have read them to your PC’s mail package, so the ‘read’ emails will get cleared then.
Within ‘Settings’ and ‘Mail, Contacts, Calendars’ you can control the display of images in your messages and whether you want to ‘bcc’ yourself on any messages you send. There are other settings here too.
Check any other settings on your phone that control where SENT and TRASH items are stored. These settings should be set to store these on your phone and then cleared periodically. Don’t make a setting to store SENT and TRASH on the server or you will rapidly fill up your mailbox. On an iPhone, these settings are in Advanced for the mail account you are configuring.
If you have problems send or receiving emails on your iPhone, iPad or other phone/tablet please read the FAQs called if you can’t send emails or setting up your mail package.