Email and Messaging

Sometimes iPhone Mail running on iOS 4 has the nasty habit of displaying blank email messages or loading empty message previews in the Inbox. This problem is easily fixed.

1. By default your message previews should be enabled. To make sure they are on, touch Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Preview and select the number of preview lines desired.

2. If you're running iOS 4 on an iPhone 3G, reset by holding down the home and sleep buttons until the Apple logo comes up on the screen.

3. For iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS users, double-click the home button to bring up multitasking.

Apple has added support for Gmail's archive feature with iOS 4. When swiping across a message you wish to delete, the red button that appears says archive instead of delete.

To disable Gmail archiving for an account, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars
2. Select the Gmail account you want to change from archive to delete
3. Touch Archive Messages -> OFF

There's no simple way to reorganize the list of email accounts in the iPhone Mail app. As accounts are added the show up at the bottom of the list. To change the order your email accounts are listed in:

1. Make sure your iPhone is connected to the computer and iTunes is running.
2. Under DEVICES in the left menu of iTunes click on your iPhone.
3. Click the Info tab at the top of the screen.
4. Make sure the box next to "Sync Selected Mail Accounts" is checked.
5. Deselect all mail accounts except the account you want at the top of your list.

Yes you can. Set up a POP3 account for Hotmail on your iPhone by following these steps:

1. Navigate to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Add Account...

2. Touch "Other"

3. Touch "Add Mail Account"

4. Enter your name, complete email address, and password.

5. If you wish you can give the account a nickname in the "Description" field.

6. Touch the Save button at the top right of the screen.

7. The iPhone will verify your account information. When finished exit settings, run Mail, and your Hotmail account will be listed in Accounts.

Update: Apple iPhone 3G and 3GS will support MMS. AT&T will begin support of MMS on their network starting on September 25, 2009.

iPhones across the world have had MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) capability since the iPhone 3GS was released on June 19. Apple declared that AT&T would make MMS available to its customers in "late summer" of this year.

Well it's getting close to crunch time for AT&T. Last time we checked, the second half of August can be referred to as "late summer" here in the Northern Hemisphere. There's been no MMS news except for disgruntled iPhone owners complaining.

Did you know that when you email a photo from the camera roll on your iPhone, the resolution of the picture is automatically degraded to 800x600? This makes sense if you don't need to send anything at a higher quality resolution.

But what if you need to send the full resolution photo? The original iPhone and iPhone 3G both take photos at 1600x1200 resolution. The iPhone 3GS with its auto-focus camera takes photos at 2048x1536 resolution.

One of the most common gripes from iPhone owners is the lack of native copy and paste functionality. Though the topic has been often discussed, until now, no actual solution has ever arrived. Thanks to coder Preston Monroe, this functionality is now available on the iPhone in the form of a Safari bookmarklet. Named iCopy by Monroe, the bookmarklet provides the ability to copy and paste text within Safari or copy text and paste directly into email.

A number of users who have upgraded and jailbroken 1.1.4 are reporting that the Mail application stops working properly after the upgrade and/or jailbreak is complete. These reports of a broken Mail.app come in a variety of forms. For some users, Mail crashes when they attempt to open it. For others, it simply fails to download any new messages. Still, for others, Mail crashes when attempting to read a message.

Regardless of the particular symptoms your Mail is experiencing, should your Mail.app be broken after upgrading and/or jailbreaking 1.1.4, here are some possible fixes:

When sending photos and links from your iPhone, the iPhone will always use your default email address.

Your default address is determined in your Mail settings. To change your default account, go to

Settings -> Mail -> Default Account (all the way at the bottom)

You may not want to see the little preview of text messages that turn up on your home screen when a new text (SMS) message comes in. To turn this off, head to your iPhone settings and go to:

General -> Notifications -> Messages

Turning off 'Show Preview' will disable the text message preview on your iPhone.

iOS 5 UPDATE: iOS 5 and later feature the Notification Center. To turn off the message preview follow these instructions:

Settings -> Notifications -> Messages -> Show Preview -> OFF