Updated
July 25, 2016.
The iPhone's Mail app offers dozens of email settings that allow you to customize how the app works. From changing the alert tone when a new email arrives and how much of the email is previewed before you open it to how often it checks for mail, learning about Mail's settings helps you master email on your iPhone.
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Turn Off Email Sounds
One of the most basic settings related to email has to do with the sounds that play when you send or receive email to confirm that something has happened.
You may want to change those noises or not have them at all. To change these settings:
- Tap Settings
- Scroll down to Sounds and tap it
- Scroll to the Sounds and Vibration Patterns section
- The relevant settings in this section are New Mail (the sound that plays when new email arrives) and Sent Mail (the sound that indicates an email has been sent)
- Tap the one you want to change. You'll see a list of alert tones to choose from, plus all of the ringtones (including custom tones) on your phone and None
- When you tap on a tone, it plays. If you want to use it, ensure the checkmark is next to it and then tap the Sounds button in the top left to return to the Sounds screen.
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Change Settings to Get Email More Often
You can control how email gets downloaded to your phone and how often your phone checks for new mail.
- Tap Settings
- Scroll down to Mail, Contacts, Calendars and tap it
- Tap Fetch New Data
- In this section, there are three options: Push, Accounts, and Advanced
- Push—automatically downloads (or "pushes") all email from your account to your phone as soon as they're received. The alternative is that emails are only downloaded when you check your mail. Not all email accounts support this, and it runs down battery life faster
- Accounts—a list of each account configured on your device lets you make an account-by-account to either Fetch email automatically or only download mail when you manually check it. Tap each account and then tap Fetch or Manual
- Fetch—the traditional way of checking email. It checks your email every 15, 30, or 60 minutes and downloads any messages that have arrived since you last checked. You can also set it to check manually. This is used if Push is disabled. The less often you check email, the more battery you'll save.
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Basic Email Settings
There are a number of other basic settings in the Mail, Contacts, Calendars section of the Settings app. They let you control the following:
- Preview—Controls the number of lines of text from the email shown in the inbox. Options range from none to 5 lines
- Show To/Cc Label—Slide this to On/green to show who an email is addressed to and who is CCed
- Swipe Options—Control what happens when you swipe left or right across an email in the inbox view. Tap Swipe Left and choose from None, Mark as Read, Flag, or Move Message to a new folder. Tap Swipe Right and choose from the same options, plus Archive
- Flag Style—Choose whether emails that you've flagged for follow up display a dot of color next to them or a flag icon
- Ask Before Deleting—Get a warning before Mail deletes an email when you moving this slider to On/green
- Load Remote Images—Slide this to On/green to load images in emails (think email newsletters). Images can be turned off to save data
- Organize by Thread—Slide this to On/green to group together related messages that are part of a conversation
- Always Bcc Myself—Slide this to On/green to always send yourself a copy of all emails you send from your phone
- Mark Addresses—Tap this and enter an email domain name (for example, gmail.com or your work email address). With that set, any email address that doesn't use that domain is highlighted in red. This is especially helpful to make sure you're not sending work email from a personal account or accidentally sending an email to the wrong address
- Increase Quote Level—When you respond to a message or forward it, having this setting turned to On/green adds indentation to the original email to make it easier to read
- Signature—Choose what message appears at the bottom of all emails send from your iPhone
- Default Account—Choose the email account that messages are sent from by default.
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Discover some powerful advanced settings, and how to configure Notification Center for email on the next page.