YOU WANT EMAIL ON your NOOK Tablet? You’ve got it. Your NOOK does a great job of handling email. Want to read attachments like pictures, Microsoft Office documents, and PDFs? The NOOK Tablet can do that. How about working with just about any email service out there? It can do that, too. You can also manage your mail, sync your mail, and plenty more right on the NOOK. It’s a great way to have your email always in your pocket. This chapter shows you how to get the most out of email on the NOOK Tablet.
To get started, first launch the email app by pressing the NOOK button, tapping Apps, and then tapping Email. If you prefer, tap the apps icon in the Media bar, and tap Email from your list of apps. You’re greeted by a Welcome screen that lets you set up an email account on the NOOK Tablet. Type your password and email address, and then tap Next.
What happens next depends upon whether you’re setting up a web-based email account such as for Gmail or Microsoft Live Hotmail, or else an account that you get through work or an Internet service provider (ISP). If you’re setting up a web-based mail account, your Google Tablet will make sure that your settings are correct, log you in, and immediately begin downloading mail to your tablet.
If you instead are setting up an email account through work or an ISP, the NOOK Tablet asks you to choose your account type, either POP or IMAP. Not sure what kind of account you have? It’s most likely a POP account (also called a POP3 account), so try that first, and if it doesn’t work, come back and try IMAP. You can also turn to POP3 and IMAP Accounts for more information about POP and IMAP accounts, and how best to use them.
Next, you’ll come to a screen full of intimidating-looking techie details. Despair not, though, because there’s a very good chance that you won’t have to change a thing on it. It has the username and password you just entered, as well as other information, such as your POP3 or IMAP server name, security type, port number, and whether the NOOK Tablet should delete email from the server when it checks for email. In the majority of cases, you won’t have to change a thing here, so tap Next.
Tip
Make sure that Never is selected in the “Delete email from server” section. If you select “When I delete from Inbox” instead, your NOOK Tablet deletes that email not just from the tablet, but from the server, and you won’t be able to read it on your computer.
Next, you’re asked to enter information about your outgoing mail server, which has the techie name SMTP server. As with the previous screen, leave everything as is, and then tap next.
You’ll now be asked how often to check for new email, whether to notify you when mail arrives, and whether the email account you’re setting up should be your default email account. Select your settings and tap Next.
The NOOK Tablet takes a moment or two to check your settings and to log you in. If life is being good to you, you should be all set—the NOOK Tablet starts downloading email to your inbox.
Tip
If you’re already using an email program on your computer, that means you’ve already set up the account there, and its settings are in the email program. So go to the account settings on the email software on your computer, and grab the settings from there.
However, as you know, life is not always good. The NOOK Tablet may have trouble logging you in.
Note
At any point during the setup process, the NOOK Tablet may report it’s having a problem setting up your account, so you may encounter problems at several points along the way.
If that’s the case, you may have entered your username and password wrong, so try again. If you’re still having problems, some of your ISP’s email settings may be different from the ones that the NOOK Tablet assumes them to be—for example, the name of the POP3 server, the port number, and so on. So take a deep breath and pick up the phone. Then call your ISP’s tech support line and read a good book on the NOOK Tablet while you wait on hold for an hour or three. When a tech comes on the line, explain the problem you’re having. Then return to the Welcome screen for setting up an email account, tap Manual Setup, and then select either POP or IMAP; tap OK. That takes you to the screen with all the techie details, including the name of the POP3 or IMAP server, the security type, and port number. Ask the techie for those details, and have him or her stay on the line while you fill them in and make sure you can connect to your email account.
Here’s what you need to know about POP3 and IMAP accounts for setting up and using on your NOOK Tablet:
With a POP (Post Office Protocol) account, the POP server delivers email to your inbox. From then on, the messages live on your NOOK Tablet—or your home computer, or whichever machine you used to check email. You can’t download another copy of that email, because POP servers let you download a message only once. So if you use your account on both a computer and your NOOK Tablet, you must be careful to set up the account properly, as described in the box in Workaround Workshop: 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 NOOK Tablet. Instead, it keeps all your mail on the server, so you can access the exact same mail from your NOOK Tablet 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 and send mail on your NOOK Tablet, 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.