Send and receive email on your mobile phone

We are going to show you how to set up email on a mobile phone so you can stay in touch without having to switch between phone and computer to keep track of conversations – and all this without running up expensive bills.

It’s easy to get the impression from adverts that there are just a handful of phones that make it simple and straightforward to read emails – Apple’s iPhone and the Blackberry range, beloved of businesspeople who feel they have to be in touch all the time.

In fact almost all recent mobile phones can send and receive email. They might not all have the slick interface of an iPhone, or the full keyboard of a Blackberry, but unless the device in your pocket is a bargain-basement model or several years old, it will be able to send and receive messages easily – the trick is knowing how to set it up.

All smartphones have email, either via the same ‘messaging’ options used to send and receive texts, or sometimes as through a separate email menu or program.

Setting it up
Configuring a mobile phone for email might sound tricky but it’s almost as simple as setting up an email program on a PC.

If you have done that, you should find it quite simple to get email on the go, though don’t forget that since mobile email requires a connection to the internet, you will need that option on your mobile account.

These days, it’s almost always available, though for an older contract it might be necessary to call customer service and ask for it to be switched on.

Like computers, mobile phones have an operating system and this dictates how email is set up. Nokia uses one called Symbian, the T-Mobile G1 uses a relative newcomer to the mobile scene called Android.

Apple’s iPhone has something different, and a whole range of phones run Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.