#anz23mthings Week 3 Email on the go!

I love email on the go! I have five email accounts linked up to my iPhone, my iPad, and even my old iTouch so that they are part of iCloud.  Some of my friends think I am crazy for even having four personal email accounts, but I use them for different things.  The fifth email account I have linked up is the Collingwood Historical Society Yahoo account.

I don't use push notifications for any of these accounts as it would drive me mad.  I do check the emails regularly though and any new ones upload when I open the interface.   In fact, I am not a big fan of push notifications for anything so it is nothing different for email accounts or apps.

I use the standard (IOS I suppose) interface on my devices. I already had the individual Gmail and Yahoo! Mail apps installed on my phone, but I didn't know about Mailbox until I was reading for this Thing. I can see that they all have good things about them and things that would improve the IOS interface. But I don't use them except occasionally.  And the reason?  These are all limited to a single email provider, though you can have multiple accounts registered with the one provider with Mailbox at least.

Why I like the IOS interface is quite simple. I have email accounts with my ISP, Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail (aka Outlook).  I can see all my email accounts on the one interface, and even through the one master inbox.  I can flag items for followup action in any account and they appear both there and in the flagged file, and ditto with VIP emails. With the Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts I can move them into relevant folders and I can view the complete online contents of those folders like I would on the web. Once I had to go into different websites to do this. You can see the interface for my Yahoo folders above.

The downside to reading email across different devices is that some work well with this and others don't.  The emails from my ISP account are the main problem with this as they remain unread on other devices and on webmail despite being read on one device. I don't think this is a settings problem.  I just think it is a downside of the service.  I'm not a big Gmail user and was very late getting an account as by the time it arrived I already had active Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts for cloud email.  I find Yahoo! works best across devices and syncs immediately.  Hotmail seems to have a bit of a time lag but does catch up.  Maybe I should fiddle with the settings again?

One issue can trick me and I need to be conscious of it I have had Outlook open on my PC. That is that intermittently, if Outlook is open and I think if it does an auto send/receive, the new items uploaded will not appear on my devices.  And all emails written in Outlook will only appear on my devices if I bcc or cc my myself.  That can be a pain if you want the full email trail on the go.  But really these are minor things compared to the convenience of having access to all the accounts in one place.

So yes, email on the go is a great thing for me.  It's a great way for people to get in contact with me.  If I don't want to deal with stuff immediately I just flag them for later action and I regularly review the flagged items.  I do wish there was some way of linking these as tasks to my calendar.  If there is a way someone please let me know!