**********Intro**********
The Mail app on your iPhone is probably one of the less exciting apps you’ve got installed, but it’s
actually very good, and much improved with some additions that came along in iOS16. I’ve never
actually made a complete tutorial video for Mail for iPhone, so today I thought I’d change that.
Stick with me, as I walk you step by step, in how to use and get the most out of Mail for iPhone.
Just so you know, I’m running iOS16.2 as I make this video,
do ensure that you’re running that version or newer, so you can do everything we discuss here.
OK, let’s get into it.
******************************Adding Accounts******************************
The first thing we need to do to make the most of the Mail app,
is add some Mail accounts to it, because without that, our app won’t know where to
download email from. We do this by going to Settings, then scrolling down to Mail,
and then tapping into Accounts. If you’ve got any email accounts already associated with your phone,
they’ll show here. This would most likely be if you’ve setup an iCloud account when setting up
your iPhone for example, and it comes with an email address, that email address would
most likely be here already, like I’ve got here. But we can add some other accounts too.
To do that, tap on Add Account. Apple provide templates for setting up the
most common email addresses, iCloud, Microsoft Exchange, GMail, Yahoo, AOL and Outlook.com,
but you can add pretty much any email address you like using the Other option at the bottom.
Note that for all of these, you’ll need to follow the on-screen instructions and input
the correct information for your account, and if you struggle, or you’re unsure about
any of the information you need to input, you’ll need to contact your email provider.
To show you how easy this is, what I will do is just quickly add a GMail
account. You can see that it’s just a case of tapping through,
adding whatever information the app asks us to add to verify the account.
Also, if I jump back a couple of screens to the Accounts page, notice this section here that says
Fetch New Data. If I tap into that, you can see that we’ve got some options here, and this page
can be a little confusing if you’re unfamiliar with how Push and Fetch works. Essentially,
this is all linked to how frequently mail is going to be sent from the mail server to your phone.
Where possible, I’d recommend enabling Push. I say ‘where possible’, because it won’t be supported
by all email providers, but most modern ones do offer it these days. Push vs Fetch essentially
means how your device learns about and downloads new emails. With Push, your device gets notified
about a new email by the email server, and then downloads it. When it’s working properly,
email is received almost immediately by your phone, and it’s very efficient. Fetch involves
your phone asking the server if there’s new email, at a timeframe determined by you.
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**************Navigation**************
So, when you open up Mail, this is how your screen will most likely look. It’s pretty basic,
but everything that you need to get started is either here,
or can be here with a simple edit of this screen.
The top part of this screen, where it says Mailboxes, is kind of an amalgamated view
of all of your mailboxes, pulled together into one. We’ve currently got two inboxes,
an iCloud and a GMail account, so the All Inboxes will bring all mail from both of them together.
Underneath that, we can see the mailboxes that we’ve currently got configured to this device,
which is our iCloud account and GMail account, we’ll ignore that for now. If I tap this Edit
button up at the top right, notice that a load of options appear. These are essentially filters,
Apple calls them Smart Mailboxes, and help to manage a busy mailbox or collection of mailboxes.
So here for example, if I tap on the filter that says Attachments, that will then add
an attachments only mailbox to my Mail app. And then, when I tap into that mailbox, it will only
show me emails that have been received in any of my mailboxes, that contain attachments. If I
jump back to the Edit screen, you can see that there are some really useful options in here,
like Flagged Emails, or emails received today. One that I would definitely recommend that you
consider including and then using, is the VIP option. If I tap on an email,
and then tap on the contact up at the top, I can then choose Add to VIP. With this done,
this contact’s emails will not only be visible in the VIP smart mailbox, but they will also create a
notification on my phone. I use this for business related contacts where I know that, if they email
me, I want to know about it right away, and I can then action their email really quickly.
****************************************Creating a new email****************************************
So, to draft a new email, tap this button in the bottom right of the screen. You can
see that a new message is created. In the To field, you would type in the email address,
or addresses of recipients, or if you’ve got a Contact stored in your phone with
an email address associated with them, you could simply type in the recipient’s name.
If I tap into the Cc/Bcc and From field, we’ve got some more options. Cc is Carbon Copy, and Bcc is
Blind Carbon Copy. Essentially, any emails that you insert into the Cc field will also receive
the email alongside anyone in the To field, but they’ll be able to see that they’ve been Cc’d into
the email, and will also be able to see the other email addresses included in that field. Anyone who
you insert into Bcc will also receive the email, but they won’t be able to see any other email
addresses. This is useful if you need to fire the same email out to lots of people, but allowing
everyone to see everyone else’s email address would perhaps be a breach of data regulations. .
In the From field, you can change the email address that you’re using to send the email,
if you’ve got multiple accounts setup of course.
Then in Subject, you’d type in a subject, and notice this little bell icon to the right.
You can receive notifications whenever anyone replies to the email thread if you wish, so if
it’s a particularly important email that you’re keeping track of, this could be quite useful.
If we then tap into the body of the email, this is of course where we can begin to draft the
email itself. One thing to mention is this line here that says “Sent from my iPhone”. You’ve no
doubt seen this loads of times over the years, it’s a signature that Apple inserts by default,
but most people either get rid of it or change it. To do that, head into Settings and then Mail,
and then scroll down to the ‘Composing’ section. Tap into where it says ‘signature’,
and you can either delete the signature, or you can input your own in here instead,
whatever you’d prefer. You can also set this on a per account basis, or to cover all accounts.
Right, back on the email, I’m going to input some text.
Notice this bar that appears just above the keyboard. We’ve got a number of
options to choose from here, to format the email, and add additional content to it.
If I tap on the Aa button, we’ve got our text formatting options. This is pretty extensive,
we can make text bold, italic, underlined or struck through. We can make text smaller and
larger using these buttons here, and we can change the colour of the text. We can change the default
font if we wish, and then below that, we’ve got options for bullets, number bullets, alignment
and indentation of text, so most of your text formatting needs should be taken care of here.
I’ll tap the cross to come back, but notice that when I do that,
predictive text is trying to predict words I might want to input into my email. I’d
like to get back to the previous menu, so to do that, I’m going to tap this arrow button here.
The photos button will allow me to insert an image or a video. I can
choose from my recent photos, or I can choose All Photos, to access my entire
photo library. Simply tap on whatever you’d like to add, to insert it into the email.
The camera icon will access the camera,
and allow me to insert a photo or a video right into the email.
This document with a square around it is the scan button. I can use this to scan a paper document
in, replacing the need for a conventional image scanner. I find that the best way to do this,
is to position the document on a contrasting colour. So a white piece of paper would work best
when positioned on a dark table for example. Simply line it up, and scan the image in.
This icon of text with a square around it is the Live Text option. With this,
rather than scanning a document in, we can insert text from anywhere that you capture it,
into the email as computer text. I’ll demo this now to show you how it works.
This paper icon here is to insert a file, and when we tap on that, we’re taken to our Files app,
and can search for a file, or browse for one. Simply tap to insert it into your email.
Finally, this pen icon allows us to insert a drawing. When we tap on it,
we’re taken to a scribble sheet, with all of the usual pen and pencil options down at the bottom,
which we can use to draw something in with our finger, and then insert as a PNG file at the end.
That’s essentially how you draft emails in Mail, but before we wrap that section up,
a couple more things to show you. First, like everywhere else on the iPhone that involves text,
you can dictate content in if you wish. Tap this little microphone button down at the
bottom of the screen, and just begin saying what you’d like Siri to input for you. It’s
generally pretty good, and you shouldn’t have to manually insert punctuation , but
every now and then you might have to pause for a moment to insert a comma or a period.
The other thing to show you, is that you can drag things from other parts of your iPhone,
right into Mail if you wish. So here for example, I’m in the Photos app,
not in Mail. Let’s say that I want to input this photo into my email. Rather than adding
it in from the Mail app, I can just drag it from here, into the Mail app, and drop it right onto
the email. You’ll most likely need to use two hands to do this, as you can see here.
Also, let’s just talk quickly about saving an email as a draft. If I tap Cancel, without sending
the email, I have the option to either delete the email, or save it as a draft. If I choose Save
Draft, the email disappears, and if I tap Edit on the Mailbox page, you’ll notice that I don’t have
an option to add in a Drafts folder. This doesn’t matter though, as the way to access Drafts is to
simply tap and hold for a second on the New Email button, and you’ll be taken to your Drafts folder.
We can then access the draft we were working on, and pick up where we left off if we wish.
************************PDF Shoutout************************
By the way, if you prefer to have content like this in a written format,
there’s a PDF to accompany this video, and you can access it by becoming a channel member,
where for a small monthly fee, you’ll get access to all video PDFs moving forward, plus the growing
library of old ones. Just hit the Join button on this video, and follow the instructions.
************************Sending Mail************************
When you’re ready to send an email, you’ll have the option do this by pressing this blue button
with the arrow in the upper right corner. If you tap here, your email will be sent. But, if you tap
and hold here for a moment, you can choose to send the email later. The app will give you contextual
options based on the time of day you do this, but you can always press the Send Later button,
and choose a specific date and time to send it. This is a great feature, but do be aware that
you’ll need your phone to be online at the time of sending for this to work. So if for example,
you were about to board a 10 hour flight where your phone would be offline for the entire time,
and you chose for something to send in 2 hours time, this wouldn’t work.
Also, as this is an email with an image, notice that when I hit send,
I have some image sizing options to choose from. Mail can automatically resize the images
to make them small, medium, large or leave them as their actual size, which is useful
if you know that you’re sending to an inbox where someone would prefer a smaller message.
Also, notice what happens when I hit send. We get this ‘Undo Send’ button appear at the
bottom of the screen. If I tap that, we’re returned to the draft email,
and the email isn’t sent. Apple have talked about this as though it’s an email recall,
and it’s not really. It’s a send delay. Essentially, once you hit send,
you’ve got a pre-defined period of time to quickly change your mind,
if you notice that you’ve sent something that you shouldn’t have. The default is 10 seconds,
but if we head into Settings, then Mail and scroll right the way down to the bottom, we can tap into
Undo Send Delay. We can either toggle this off, or choose from 10 seconds, 20 seconds or 30 seconds.
**************************Proper Weekly**************************
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******************************************************Receiving and Managing
Mail******************************************************
Right, so we now know how to create an email, which is a pretty important part
of working with email, let’s explore the other part, which is receiving and managing emails.
So for that, I’ve sent through a number of emails to this account. I’ve sent some personal emails,
and I’ve signed the account up to some mailing lists as well,
to give you an idea of how this all looks.
First up, a handy little icon to know is this one down here in the
bottom left. This is to toggle an Unread filter. Toggle it on,
and you’ll only see your unread emails, toggle it off, and you’ll see everything.
If you tap and hold on an email for a moment, you can see that we’ve got a number of options. We can
reply, reply to all and forward the email on. We can mark the email, either flagging it, marking it
as unread, or moving it to our junk folder. We’ve got the notify option here as well, or we can mute
replies to this email. We can move the message to a specific folder, delete it, or block the sender.
There are also some options that you can access by swiping on an email here in the
inbox. If you swipe left to right, we can mark the email as unread, or we can be reminded
about the email. This is handy if you receive something that you know you want to work on,
but perhaps not right away, as choosing Remind Me will give you some different options for when
to be reminded. At the correct time, the email will appear at the top of your mailbox again.
If we swipe from right to left, we can flag the email or delete it. The More
option is essentially the same as pressing and holding on the email,
it’s just that the options look slightly different here.
Tapping into an email, there are some options there as well.
Notice that up here at the top of the email, we can see some limited information, the sender,
our email address and the date that the email was received. If I tap into this area, this expands,
and gives me more information. I can tap on the sender for example,
to see the actual email address that was used to send this email. This is really useful,
especially if you want to check the validity of an email that’s been sent to you. Likewise,
increasingly you can see whether an address has been digitally certified or not, helping to
give you the confidence of knowing that an email you’ve received has come from a trusted sender.
Down at the bottom of the email, we’ve got a delete button, a move button where
we can stash this email away in a folder, a reply button, and when you tap on that
you’ll have the options for using Reply All or Forward, and a New Email button.
**********************Mail Search**********************
Searching for email is really easy in the Mail app, there’s not a huge amount to talk about here,
but in order to search, you’re either going to tap into the All Inboxes mailbox up here at the top,
or a specific inbox if you’d like to focus the search on one inbox in particular. Swipe
down to show the search bar up here at the top, and in there you would search,
either for a term in an email, or in a subject line, or the name of a sender,
there’s lots of things you can search for, and you can see that as I input a search term,
my app gives me suggestions for how and where I might search.
**************************Mail Settings**************************
So that’s essentially everything that you need to know about the Mail app. But before we finish the
video, I want to revisit the Mail Settings page, to ensure that we’ve covered all of the useful
stuff in there. As a reminder, we open Settings, then scroll down to Mail. In here, we can choose
how much of a preview we’d like to see of each email, and whether we’d like to see the To and
Cc labels on the preview or not, as well as the ability to edit some of the swipe options.
Another useful section is the Threading section further down. With Organise by Thread toggled on,
messages that are part of a thread will be grouped together, rather than showing you lots of
individual messages. I’ll show you an example on the screen now. When you tap on the arrow, you can
expand the messages out to then locate specific emails from within the thread if you need to.
Blocked Sender options is useful, as I believe the default action here is for emails from blocked
senders to still show in your inbox, but to be marked as coming from a blocked sender. Obviously,
the preference here is going to be for the email to not make it to your inbox at all,
and to instead get automatically moved to the bin, and you can choose that if you wish.
Under Composing, you can choose to always Bcc yourself into emails if you wish,
and you can also choose the default account to use,
which is handy if you’ve got a main account that you use most of the time.
******End******
So there you go, that’s the Mail app for iPhone, a complete tutorial. What do you think,
do you like the Mail app these days? Or, do you insist on using an alternative Mail app? If yes,
which one and why? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.