iPhone 5 Portable Genius

Configuring E-mail Accounts

Setting up an e-mail account on your iPhone is one thing, but making that account do useful things — or sometimes, anything at all — is quite another. The next few sections take you through a few useful settings that help you get more out of e-mail and troubleshoot e-mail problems.

Managing multiple devices by leaving messages on the server

In today’s increasingly mobile world, it’s not unusual to find you need to check the same e-mail account from multiple devices. For example, you might want to check your business account not only using your work computer but also using your home computer, or using your iPhone while commuting or traveling.

If you need to check e-mail on multiple devices, you can take advantage of how POP e-mail messages are delivered over the Internet. When someone sends you a message, it doesn’t come directly to your computer. Instead, it goes to the server that your Internet service provider (or your company) has set up to handle incoming messages. When you ask Apple Mail to check for new messages, it communicates with the POP server to see if any messages are waiting in your account. If so, Mail downloads those messages to your computer and then instructs the server to delete the copies of the messages that are stored on the server.

The trick, then, is to configure Mail so that it leaves a copy of the messages on the POP server after you download them. That way, the messages are still available when you check messages using another ...