You’re not confined to using Gmail on the Droid X—you can use your other email accounts as well. To set one up, tap My Accounts from the Application Tray. You see a list of you existing accounts, not just including email, but others as well, such as Facebook, and even your Visual Voice Mail account if you have one (Visual Voicemail). Tap “Add account”. You see a list of the various kinds of accounts you can add, including a general email account, or a Yahoo Mail account.
To add a Yahoo Mail account, tap it, fill in your Yahoo user name and password, and you’re ready to go. There’s nothing else you need to do.
Not everyone has a Gmail account or a Yahoo account. Your primary email account may come from work or your Internet service provider (ISP). As a general rule, these kinds of accounts use one of two technologies:
With a POP (Post Office Protocol) account, the POP server delivers email to your inbox. From then on, the messages live on your Droid X—or your home computer, or whichever machine you used to check email. You can’t download another copy of that email, because POP servers only let you download a message once. So if you use your account on both a computer and your Droid X, you must be careful to set up the account properly, as described in the box on Keeping Your POP Mailboxes in Sync, so you won’t accidentally delete email. Despite this caveat, POP accounts remain the most popular type of email accounts, and are generally the easiest to set up and use.
With an IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) account, the server doesn’t send you the mail and force you to store it on your computer or Droid X. Instead, it keeps all your mail on the server, so you can access the exact same mail from your Droid X and your computer—or even from multiple devices. The IMAP server always remembers what you’ve done with your mail—what messages you’ve read and sent, your folder organization, and so on. So if you read mail, send mail, and reorganize your folders on your Droid X, when you then check your mail on a computer, you’ll see all those changes, and vice versa.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that if you don’t remember to regularly clean out your mail, your mailbox can overflow if your account doesn’t have enough storage to hold it all. If your IMAP account gets full, then when people send you email, their messages bounce back to them.
Note
With the exception of a Gmail account, you can add only email accounts that you’ve previously set up to your Droid X. If you get a new email account at work or home, get it all set up before you try to add it to your phone.
The Droid X works with both types of accounts, and setting them up is the same as well. From the Application Tray, tap My Accounts→“Add account”→Email, and from the screen that appears, fill in your user name and password,. Make sure that the “Automatically configure account” checkbox is turned on. The Droid X now attempts to automatically configure your email account for you. Most of the time it will be able to figure out your settings, but sometimes it fails. In that case, it shows you a screen where you need to fill in techie details, such as server names for the outgoing mail server (SMTP), whether you use POP3 or IMAP, the incoming mail server name, and so. If you don’t have the information at hand (and face it, who does?) check with your ISP or your corporate tech support staff.
You can set up as many email accounts as you want on your Droid X. (As you’ll see later in this chapter, you can view mail from all of them in a single inbox.)