Send and receive emails from your Android smartphone or tablet

Before beginning, it’s important to check that the Android Email app will be able to collect messages from the email services you’d like to use. For webmail services such as Hotmail and Gmail, this means enabling either Pop or Imap access. We’re using Gmail as an example but other services can be configured in similar ways. Log into your Gmail account, click the cog icon at the top right of the screen and choose Mail settings. Now click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP link and choose to enable either or both of these from the options presented: Imap is a far more flexible protocol for sending and receiving emails, so we would recommend using it wherever available.

Now launch the Email app on your Android device by tapping it with your finger. The icon looks like a sealed envelope, and shouldn’t be confused with the icons for the Messaging app (an open envelope) and the Gmail app (an open envelope in a different style). On most Android phones, it will look much like it does in our screenshot – it’s the green icon at the bottom left.

When the application launches for the first time you will be prompted to add the first email account. To do this, type in the email address and password. Having set up the first email account, more can be added. To add another account, tap the device’s page menu button (this is usually a hardware button rather than part of the touchscreen). Once the menu appears, tap the ‘Add account’ option at the bottom of the screen (and notice also the Compose button here). We’ve set up three webmail accounts: Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. To delete an email account, tap and hold your finger on the one you want to delete and a pop-up menu will appear. Just tap the ‘Delete account’ option.

Let’s compose an email. Tap the Compose option mentioned in Step 3 and a screen like this will appear. Tap to the right of the ‘From:’ field to change the email address from which the message is sent – we are able to select any of our three accounts. In each field, type the things you would normally add as if sending an email from a PC. When each section is tapped, the on-screen keypad will pop up and allow you to input text. You are given the option to attach files to emails: choosing this will allow you to add images to an email, for example.

We can look at emails from each account in turn or tap the Combined inbox option at the top to see all our emails in one view. Tapping the small refresh icon – two arrows in a circle – will prompt the app to check for new emails. In our example, we have opened the inbox for our Hotmail account and here have access to all our messages ordered by date, all our Draft messages, Sent messages and Trash messages. Tapping an email in this window will open it.

Now we have tapped to open an email and we can see that we have been sent a message that includes some text and a web link. Tapping the link will open it in a web browser window in exactly the same way as our webmail account would do. Tapping the device’s page menu button brings up several options including Reply, Forward, Delete and Move to. Another menu can be accessed by tapping More. Here it’s possible to change the way the message is displayed or add the sender’s details to our device’s address book.