iPhone: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Surviving Email Overload

If you don't get much mail, you probably aren't lying awake at night trying to think of ways to manage so much information overload on your tiny phone.

If you do get a lot of mail, here are some tips.

The Spam Problem

Mail is an awfully full-fledged email program for a phone. But compared with a desktop email program, it's really only half-fledged. You can't send file attachments, can't create mail rules—and can't screen out spam.

Spam, the junk mail that makes up more than 80 percent of email, is only getting worse. So how are you supposed to keep it off your iPhone?

The following solution will take 15 minutes to set up, but it will make you very happy in the long run.

Suppose your regular email address is [e-mail].

1. Sign up for a free Gmail account. You do that at www.gmail.com.

   The idea here is that you're going to have all your [e-mail] messages sent on to this Gmail account, and you'll set up your iPhone to check the Gmail account instead of your regular account.

   Why? Because Gmail has excellent spam filters. They'll clean up the mail mess before it reaches your iPhone.

   Unfortunately, just forwarding your mail to the Google account won't do the trick. If you do that, then the return address on every message that reaches your iPhone will be [e-mail]. When you tap Reply on the iPhone, your response won't be addressed to the original sender; it'll be addressed right back to you!

   But the brainiacs at Google have anticipated ...