The Mail application on both the iPhone and iPod touch works with a wide variety of email providers, including Apple’s MobileMe service, Microsoft Exchange as well as popular web-based email services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail. You may also configure email that is based on the POP3 or IMAP protocols.
Mail also supports sending and receiving of embedded content like photos and graphics, as well as popular email attachments like Microsoft Office documents (including the new Office XML file formats), Apple iWork documents (Pages, Numbers and Keynote), Adobe PDFs and contact cards.
The moment I got my iPod touch, I checked the Settings menu and configured basically everything to my liking, including linking the iPod touch to most of my email accounts, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and my workplace’s Microsoft Exchange account.
Getting your mail on your iPhone or iPod touch has its many advantages. Your mail follows you as long as you have an active data connection. And, unlike web-based email, you don’t get served with ads on your device, resulting in much neater and faster email experience. However, the real gem comes in the form of ‘push email’.
Push email aims to automatically deliver new information to your device, usually as soon as it appears on the server. This basically eliminates the need to check periodically or manually for new messages. At this moment, push email is supported for MobileMe, Microsoft Exchange and Yahoo! Mail accounts, including custom push email accounts that you may have. From my experience, push email works with my Exchange account, but not my Yahoo! Mail account. I have tried the many solutions found on the web, including deleting and recreating the account on my iPod touch to no avail. Guess I should just live with it.
Aside to all the advantages outlined above, I find myself moving my email around more often when using Mail. I prefer having a clean mailbox, but it seems that every time I check my email using the web interfaces, I procastinate moving the email around. Perhaps I was discouraged by the fact that I’ll need to click on each check box and then selecting or dragging the mail to its designated archive folders. With Mail, I simply swipe on each unwanted email and then press delete. Its a two-step process, but I felt that I actually get to ‘touch’ my email and ‘throw’ them away.
So far, my experience with Mail on my iPod touch has been pretty good. I’d love to see some enhancements in the future, including an option to not download any images. Helpful if your data connection is of the slower EDGE or if you’d prefer more privacy (some email senders use images to track if you have opened a particular message).
June 10th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Thank you for this informative post!