Bulletproof Email Solutions for iPhone and iPad

Now that you've got an iPhone and / or iPad, your email app is sure to be one of your most important tools for staying connected with friends and family while out on the road, or on the beach.

The major cellular providers on the Island, Rogers and Telus, have some obscure and hard-to-find email setup instructions for Apple devices. Shaw, the dominant internet provider, also fails to give a coherent solution for sending and receiving emails while outside your home’s wireless network area. Even if you manage to input the correct credentials, the results are often inconsistent and generally frustrating.

In my experience, your best and simplest bet for email on your mobile device is to use a Gmail account, and filter your existing email through that account. You can continue to send mail using your regular address no matter where you are, whether at home, in a coffee shop, or lounging poolside. Gmail is secure, free, accessible anywhere, and backed by Google, one of the largest, most respected companies in the world.

Navigate to http://gmail.com and click the sign up button, then follow the simple steps to create a Google account. Your Google user name will become your Gmail address, ie., yourname@gmail.com.

Adding your new Gmail address to your mobile device is dirt-simple. Just type the address into your mail settings along with your password, and the device will add the rest of the settings automatically.

Once you’ve created the address, you can navigate to the Gmail settings menu to allow you to send email from your existing Shaw, Telus, or any other address. That option appears in the ‘Accounts and Import’ panel of your Gmail settings. Add your existing address in the ‘Send Mail As’ option in the list. You’ll have to then confirm your account via an email that Google will send you.

On the same settings page, you can also choose to use Gmail to check the messages from your other account, thus allowing you to keep just one email account on your device. Because Gmail uses the IMAP protocol, this will help sync your messages across all your applicable devices, ie., if you delete an email from your phone, that message will also be deleted from your iMac, your iPhone, and your iPad.

There may come a day when local service providers catch up with the technology their customers are using, but until then, Gmail will do just nicely, thank you.