The days when your phone’s sole purpose was to help you call someone are long gone and the thought of just using a phone for calls actually sounds absurd. Because your phone does so much more than that. It’s actually a communication powerhouse that lets you connect to anyone by pretty much any medium you want. From video chatting to emailing – your phone can do it all. While you may be an expert at texting or instant messaging online through Facebook, there are some pretty handy ways your mail app can help you become an expert at emails too.

Here are 5 Tips to Help You Make The Most of Your Phone’s Mail App:

iPhone

  1. Setup Multiple Emails – Most of us keep track of at least two or more email accounts. You have your work emails, personal emails, and sometimes even an entire email address dedicated to promotions and sales. Your iPhone mail app can help you manage all of these. If you’ve linked one email address to your Mail app already, link your other accounts by going into your iPhone Settings > Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars >Tap Add Account.
  2. Customize Your Signature – Don’t like the standard “Sent from my iPhone” signature on all the emails you send? Instead of manually erasing it every time, go into your iPhone Settings > Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Tap Signature and then fill in your new signature.
  3. Change Your Swiping Actions – Your standard settings allow you to Swipe Right on a message to Mark as Read and Swipe Left to Flag it. You can actually change these settings to do one of the following instead: archive, move a message to a different folder, or do nothing at all. Go to your iPhone Settings > Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars> Tap Swipe Options.
  4. Preview More Lines – Go into your iPhone Settings > Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Tap Preview and choose how many lines of an email you want to read before you open the message.
  5. Set Important Messages Apart – If you go into your Mail app, you’ll notice a VIP section under your Inbox tab. Make use of this setting and add important contacts to this tab to get all of their emails automatically separated from the rest. Just Tap on VIP and add contacts.

Android

  1. Setup Multiple Accounts – While Android devices now come with the Gmail app, there are still ways for you to manage multiple email accounts from the Gmail app as long as the other email accounts are also hosted by Gmail. Open your Gmail app > Tap the drop-down menu under your avatar > Tap Add New Accounts.
  2. Mass Sort Emails – If you want to select multiple messages at once to archive or delete them, simply tap on the message senders’ contact photo to select. Then you can archive, delete, and mark as unread/read by selecting an action from the top of the screen.
  3. Search Messages – You have a search function available to you on Gmail. Use it to quickly find older messages or find all emails from an individual contact. Some handy search tricks include adding “from:” to find messages from a specific person and “older_than” to find messages older than a specific date.
  4. Add Labels – Easily categorize your messages by selecting or opening a message > tapping the Menu button > Selecting Change Labels > and then checking or unchecking the labels you want to add or delete. To create new labels, you’ll first need to open your Gmail account on your web browser and create them.
  5. Recover Deleted Messages – If you delete a message but then remember you needed information from it, don’t panic. Just tap the Menu > then tap Trash > Open the message > Tap “move to” > Choose a label. Your message will be retrieved from the trash and re-saved.

Make your life easier by using your phone to better manage your emails. Follow these tips and you’ll be going through your emails on-the-go in no time.

Bonus Tip: To manage your voicemail messages from your email, use YouMail Visual Voicemail. All of your messages can be automatically sent to your email inbox so you can handle all messages from one place. Check us out today!