iPhone 5 For Dummies, 6th Edition

See Me, Read Me, File Me, Delete Me: Working with Messages

Now that your e-mail accounts are all set up, it’s time to find out how to receive and read the stuff. Fortunately, you already did most of the heavy lifting when you set up your e-mail accounts. Getting and reading your mail is a piece of cake.

You can tell when you have unread mail by looking at the Mail icon at the bottom of your Home screen. The cumulative number of unread messages across all your e-mail inboxes appears in a little red circle in the upper-right area of the icon.

Reading messages

Tap the Mail icon now to summon the Mailboxes screen shown in Figure 12-6. At the top of the Inboxes section is the All Inboxes inbox, which as its name suggests is a repository for all the messages across all your accounts. The number to the right of All Inboxes should match the number in the Mail icon on your Home page. (If it doesn’t, some fuzzy math is going on.) Again, it’s the cumulative tally of unread messages across all your accounts.

Figure 12-6: The Mailboxes screen is divided by inboxes and accounts.

Below the All Inboxes listing are the inboxes for your individual e-mail accounts. The tally this time is only for the unread messages in each account.

Scroll down toward the bottom of the Mailboxes screen and you’ll find an Accounts section with a similar listing of e-mail accounts. But if you tap on the listings ...