Reading Email

Reading email is quick and easy.Whenever you receive a new email,you get a nice little notification on the status bar to let you know.

Now,just like every other time you get a status bar notification in the upper left,you can tap the status bar and drag it down the screen to see your notifications.You can just tap Clear notifications to get rid of all the notifications,or you can tap the notification in question to pull up—well,whatever the notification is for.In the case of email,you just tap New email.Because,as we said,Gmail stores emails as conversations,you see some number of unread conversations.If it’s only one,tapping the New email notification loads that one unread email.If you have multiple unread conversations,you instead end up in your Inbox.

You can use your finger to scroll through the list.If a conversation has an unread message,it’s bold in the list,with a white background. 

Tap an email to open it.If it’s a completely read conversation,you see the most recent message,along with a link to tap to see all the messages.If the conversation contains unread messages,they are all open for you to read.

If you receive a message with an attachment,you can preview most Microsoft Office file types and images by tapping the Preview button.You can also save some attachment types,such as pictures and graphics,by tapping the Download button.

Whenever you read email,you can press the Back button to get back to your Inbox.Or you can press the Menu button and then tap More and Back to Inbox.

The menu has a few other options besides the More button.

• Archive: Archiving an email removes it from your Inbox without actually deleting it. We’ll talk about the difference later.

• Add star: Stars are just one way to organize your mailbox by adding an icon to emails that you want to flag for some reason.

• Mark unread: Marks the email,or the conversation,as unread.

• Change labels: This allows you to set one or more labels on a message.Labels will appear at the top of the message/conversation.

• Delete: Delete actually deletes a message or conversation.

• More: Gives you access to Back to Inbox,which we just mentioned,and Report spam, which is used to let Google know that a spam message sneaked through the Google spam filters.This option removes the spam from your Inbox and helps improve Google’s spam filters.

If you press the Menu button again and scroll to the bottom of the message,you’ll find six more buttons.The first three are visible for every message in a conversation,and the last three are at the bottom of the conversation.

• Reply: This starts a new message in the conversation to the person who sent the mes- sage you’re currently reading.

• Reply to all: This starts a new message in the conversation to all the people on the To or Cc line of the message you’re currently reading.

• Forward: This starts a new message and requires you to provide the address of whomever you want to forward an existing message to.

• Archive: Archiving a conversation removes it from your Inbox.The conversation is stored in the All Mail folder.

• Labels: You can add and remove labels for the conversation.A label is an easy way to categorize a message or conversation.

• Delete: This is just another way to delete the conversation.

As you can see,the buttons on the email and conversation are pretty self-explanatory,so we’ll go back to the Inbox and take a look at the other options you have there.

Now that you’re in the Inbox,press the Menu button to examine the following options:

• Refresh: Although your phone should regularly update your list of messages for you on-the-fly,if it hasn’t,you can tap this option to refresh the list.

• Compose: When you want to create a new message,this is what you tap.

• View labels: You tap this option when you want to view the labels you have given to messages.

• Search: This is what Google is known for—searching for stuff or,in this case,your email. Tap this option,type in what you want to search for,and off you go.

• Settings: Tap this option to view your email settings.We’ll cover this option in the section “Customizing Gmail Settings.”