Email¶

Email reads and sends the mail of your account over IMAP and SMTP, the protocols every mail provider offers. The phone needs internet (Wi-Fi or mobile data).

Email is not part of the firmware: it is installed separately, and then shows up in the menu under Essentials.

Signing in¶

1. Open Email from the menu. It shows Your email account.
2. Tap Email address and type your address, then Password and type its password.
3. Tap Sign in, or press Enter on the keyboard. Enter moves on to what is still missing.

The phone looks up your provider's mail servers in Thunderbird's database, which knows most of them, tries the password on the IMAP server, and keeps the account. If the provider is not in the database, the form asks for its IMAP server and SMTP server: the host name each (mail.example.org), with a port after a colon when it is not the usual one (993 for IMAP, 465 for SMTP, both over TLS).

If the server refuses the password, the form says so and keeps what you typed; Cannot reach a server means the phone has no internet or the host name is wrong. The certificate of … cannot be trusted means the server proves another name than the one you typed (a mail server often answers for several domains but holds a certificate for one: use that name, the one your provider gives in its settings), or a certificate the phone does not know the issuer of; the phone never signs in to such a server.

The address and password are kept on the phone, on the data partition, and stay across updates of the firmware.

The inbox¶

Once signed in, Email opens on the inbox (Inbox in the header): its last 50 messages, newest first, each with the sender, when it arrived and its subject. Unread messages show their time in blue and their subject in full color. The list is loaded when the app opens and when you pull it down from the top, which lists the newest again. Load more at the end of the list brings the 50 before the oldest shown, until the first message of the inbox is reached; the phone keeps up to 500. What was loaded is kept and shown at once the next time, offline too, with a line above it saying why nothing new came (Cannot reach …).

Folders¶

Tap in the header: the account's folders, as the server has them. The inbox comes first, then the ones with a role (Sent, Drafts, Trash, Junk, Archive: the server says which, or their usual names do), then the rest by name, a folder inside another shown as Parent / Child. A blue count after a folder is its unread messages. Tap one: its messages show under its name, listed and kept as the inbox's are, and Email opens on that folder the next time, until another is chosen. The list of folders is kept too and shown at once, offline as well, refreshed each time the screen opens or is pulled down.

Reading a message¶

Tap a message: its subject, sender and date come first, then its text. A message written as a web page (most newsletters and notifications are) is laid out as one, with its images loaded from the internet, shrunk to the screen when laid out wider (mail is made for a 600 px window; a long web address wraps instead, it widens nothing); in the dark theme it is drawn dark, as Web Lite's pages and Books' pages are (its white the card's color, its colors as light as they were dark). One written as plain text is shown as such. Only the part you read is downloaded, not the attachments. Opening a message marks it read on the server too, so other mail programs see it read.

What you have read is kept on the phone and opens again at once, offline too; a message that leaves the list takes its kept copy with it.

Removing the account¶

Tap in the header: the account's screen shows the address and its server. Tap Remove account, then Remove in the bar that appears (or Cancel). The account and the messages kept on the phone go, and the form shows again, for another account.