Using Email with Your Amazon Fire Phone
- Setting Up an Email Account
- Deleting Accounts
- Account Settings
- Checking and Reading Your Email
- Composing Email
- Managing Email
- Customizing Your Mail
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Email is a part of our culture, and it is expected that you can read and respond to emails no matter where you are. With your Fire you can do this (assuming you have a network connection) and even more.
Once you’ve read this chapter, you’ll be the master of email on your Fire, though your Fire can’t automatically clear out your inbox for you—yet.
The Fire supports several kinds of email accounts:
- POP accounts download your email messages from the mail server and store them on your Fire. Once they’ve been downloaded, they can be deleted from the server.
- IMAP is the setting I recommend to people. Instead of downloading email to your Fire and deleting it from the server, with an IMAP account the mail stays on the server but is readable on your device. Lose your Fire? Your email is still on your mail server, so it is safe and sound.
- Exchange. Many corporations use Exchange for email, contacts, and calendaring. The Fire supports all of those uses.
Setting Up an Email Account
If a major email provider supplies your email account, chances are that it will be very easy to set up on your Fire. If, however, you run your own email server or get email from a smaller provider (perhaps your web host or a super nerdy friend), then you’ll have to know a little bit more before you can start checking your email.
Let’s start with the easiest setup first, the large providers:
- Open the Quick Settings panel by swiping down from the top of the Fire, and tap the Settings icon.
- Tap the My Accounts section.
- In the expanded My Accounts section, tap Manage Email Accounts.
Tap Add Account (4.1).
4.1 Enter your email to start the email setup process.
Your Fire automatically configures the email settings based on the email address you entered. If you’ve entered a Gmail account, the Fire sends you to Gmail’s authorization page (4.2). Enter your Gmail account password and tap Enter. If you have two-factor authentication enabled on your account (if you don’t know what this means you don’t have it enabled), enter your one-time code and tap Enter. Google then displays the list of permissions you’re giving your Fire by adding this account to the phone. If you don’t want to add the account, tap Cancel; otherwise, tap Authorize and the account is added.
4.2 For Gmail accounts, sign in with your Google user name and password.
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For all other email account types, a password field appears (4.3). Enter your password, but keep in mind that by default the password is displayed as you’re typing. If you want the password to be displayed as a series of asterisks to foil snooping eyes, tap the Hide Password box.
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4.3 Other email types will prompt you for your password right in the app.
Tap Next when you’ve finished entering your password.
That’s it! Your email account is set up. Your Fire is busy downloading email (and your contacts and calendar, if appropriate) in the background. This process can take a few moments. You can go right to this account’s inbox or add another email account if you like (4.4).
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4.4 You’re done! Go check your email.
Exchange Accounts
Many corporations give people Exchange accounts for email, calendaring, and contacts. Exchange is Microsoft’s email server product, and as you might imagine, it was designed to be run in big companies. Why should you care about this? Well, if you have an Exchange account, your Exchange administrator (that’s the team or person who runs the Exchange servers for your company) can set security policies. These policies can be applied to your Exchange account and might force you to change some settings on any device that you connect with your Exchange account (your Fire phone, for example).
For example, my Exchange admins decided that if I connect my Exchange account to a mobile device, that device must have a password on the lock screen and must be encrypted.
By default, neither of these things is true of a Fire phone. When I added my Exchange account, the Fire warned me that the Exchange server wanted to change some settings on my phone and asked if I was OK with that (4.5). I tapped OK, but if I didn’t want a lock code or encryption on my device I would have had to have tapped Cancel. I wouldn’t be able to check my Exchange mail, calendar, or contacts, but I wouldn’t have to change my phone’s settings either.
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4.5 Exchange accounts can require heightened security settings.
Organizations impose these requirements for a simple reason: phones are easy to lose. If you lose a phone with super secret corporate documents on it, wouldn’t it be cool to prevent ne’er-do-wells from just swiping up and seeing everything on the phone?
Encryption, lock codes, and other security-related topics are covered in Chapter 16.
If your email account’s settings aren’t automatically detected by the Fire, you’ll need to know some information about your account to successfully set it up:
- Whether your account is POP or IMAP (Exchange accounts are almost always auto-detected)
- The mail and SMTP server addresses
If you don’t know this information, consult your email provider’s documentation. This is basic information about your account, so it shouldn’t be difficult to track down.
Once you’ve gathered that information, the process is very similar to the one for setting up a Gmail account:
- Swipe down to open Quick Settings, go to Settings > My Accounts, and tap Manage Email Accounts.
- Enter your email address and tap Next. The Fire asks you to enter your password so it can try to auto-configure your account.
The Fire will fail to detect your account’s settings, so it will ask you to configure them manually (4.6). Along the top of the screen, you’ll see the three types of email accounts supported by the Fire. Since you’ve already gathered some information about your email account, you should know if it is POP, IMAP, or Exchange.
4.6 Manually adding an account allows for email accounts from smaller providers.
For POP accounts, tap POP3 (4.7).
4.7 Enter the details of your email account.
Enter your POP and SMTP server details (the email address and password you previously entered are automatically filled in here). By default, your Fire will download email but won’t delete it from the server. Tap Delete Email from Server to change this behavior to “When I delete from Inbox.” This will make it so that when you use your Fire to delete an email in this account, it will be deleted from the email server as well.
The IMAP settings are nearly identical except for one setting: Default Folder. Enter the default folder for your IMAP account if you have one (consult your email provider’s documentation to find out if you need to set this; most people do not).
Tap Exchange to manually set up an Exchange account, which might be needed if your organization is running an older version of Exchange. You’ll need the Exchange server address, your user name, and your password. You might also need the domain for your email.
No matter which account type you are setting up, you can also look at the security settings by tapping Security Settings and Ports. The defaults should work 99 percent of the time. The documentation for your email account will tell you very clearly if you need to change the security settings or port numbers, and this is where you can do that.
- Tap Next, and your email account is successfully set up. If contacts or calendar sync is supported, that will also start working for this newly added account.
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