Manual managingmail

The point of an email client is to let you read, write, and reply to email messages, of course. K-9 tries to let you do just that, without having to worry about lots of complex setup... but it allows you to do that complex setup if you need to. This is accomplished by providing lots of 'knobs' in setup for you to change K-9's behavior, and picking the most commonly desired setting as the default.

We'll get into those Global, Account, and Folder settings in detail in another section, mentioning them here in passing when they affect what you might see during a certain task.

Reading Messages

When you receive new mail, K-9 will retrieve it (POP) or poll for it or receive a PUSH notification about it (IMAP/WebDAV). If so configured, K-9 will use the Android system notifier facility to alert you to the new messages so you can read them.

K-9 will display a notifier on the window-shade for each mailbox which has new messages. When you tap on this notifier, you will be taken to either the Folder List or the Unread Message List for that mailbox/account, depending on the setting of Account Settings->Notifications->Notification Opens Unread for that account. If you have not turned that setting on, you can tap Inbox to be taken into it.

At this point, you're looking at a Message List -- a list of all (or only the unread) messages in a given folder; in this case, the Inbox folder for that email account. This list will display message titles (in bold if not yet read), a time or date (depending on the age of the message), and either the sender's email address or "real name". It may also display a short preview of the body text of the message, a Star icon for flagging messages and/or a multi-select checkbox, if you've enabled those options in Global Settings->Display.

At this point, you can tap on a message in the list to open it for reading, or long-press to get the message's Context Menu, which contains these options, on a scrolling pop-up menu with the message's title at its top:

• Open - Open the message for viewing
• Select - Select the message for group moving, copying or deleting
• Delete - Delete the message (Move it to the Trash folder [CHECKME])
• Forward - Forward the message by email
• Reply All - Compose a reply to the sender and all other recipients
• Reply - Compose a reply only to the sender
• Send Again - Attempt to send this message again (usually used from the Sent folder)
• Mark as Unread - Unset the Message Read flag
• Add Star - Mark the message as 'special' (\Flagged in IMAP, for example)
• Archive - Archive the message (by moving it to the Archive folder CHECKME)
• Spam - Move the message to the Spam folder
• Move - present a list of folders in the current email account to which the message can be moved; do so if one is selected
• Copy - present a list of folders in the current email account to which the message can be copied; do so if one is selected
• Share - hand the message body off to the Android Sharing facility, so the user can share it with someone in some fashion other than an email forward
• More from this sender - take the user to a new Message List, showing only messages sent From the same email address as the current message