Most people read far more email on their phone than at their desk. So when someone gets a new handset, or takes on a new member of staff, adding the company email account is usually the first job on the list.
It is a couple of minutes’ work. The part worth slowing down for is what happens afterwards: whether the connection is properly encrypted, and whether the account behaves the same way on every device you own. Get those right once and you will not think about it again.
Using Microsoft 365? This guide is not the one you want. A Microsoft 365 mailbox should be added as an Exchange account rather than having its server settings entered by hand, which sorts the settings out for you and works properly with multi-factor authentication. Our guide to Microsoft 365 on your phone and desktop covers it.
The steps below are for a standard business mailbox on your own domain, the sort that comes with your web hosting.
What you need before you start
Setting up a business email account is not quite the same as adding a Gmail or iCloud account, where your phone already knows the settings. For a company address on your own domain, you need four things to hand:
- Your full email address and its password
- The incoming mail server address
- The outgoing mail server address
- Confirmation of whether the account uses IMAP or POP
If you do not have those, whoever looks after your email will. If we look after yours, just ask us and we will send them over.
Choose IMAP, not POP
If you are given the choice, choose IMAP.
The difference matters more than it sounds. POP was designed for a world where people checked email on one computer: it downloads messages onto that device and, depending on the settings, removes them from the server. Read something on your laptop and your phone may never see it.
IMAP keeps everything on the server and lets each device show the same view of it. Read a message on your phone and it is read on your laptop too. File something into a folder at your desk and the folder is there on your iPad. For anyone using more than one device, which is now more or less everyone, IMAP is the right answer.
Adding the account
On the phone, open Settings, find Mail, then Mail Accounts, then Add Account. Apple moves this around every couple of iOS releases, so if it is not exactly there, search the Settings app for “accounts” and you will find it.
You will be offered a list of the big providers. For a business address on your own domain, ignore those and choose Other, then Add Mail Account. Fill in your name, the email address, the password, and a description that will help you tell this account apart from the others.
The phone will then ask for the incoming and outgoing server details. Enter them exactly as they were given to you, with the username usually being your full email address rather than just the part before the @.
That last point is worth dwelling on, because it is far and away the most common cause of the setup problems we get asked about. Almost every “my email will not connect” enquiry turns out to be a mistyped server address or a username entered as alan when the server expects alan@example.com. If something fails, check those two before anything else.
Check the connection is encrypted
Every time your phone checks for new mail, it logs in to the mail server with your username and password. If that conversation is not encrypted, anyone in a position to watch the network can read it, which matters most on exactly the networks people use their phones on: cafés, hotels, airports, and shopping centres.
Encrypted, the whole exchange is scrambled before anything is sent, and your credentials stay yours.
Modern iOS is much better at turning this on by itself than it used to be, but it is worth checking rather than assuming, particularly on an account that has been carried across from an older phone. In the account’s settings, look for Advanced for the incoming server and the Outgoing Mail Server entry for the sending side, and confirm:
- Use SSL is switched on for both incoming and outgoing
- The outgoing (SMTP) port is 587
- The incoming port is 993 for IMAP, or 995 if you are using POP
If you see a “Cannot verify server identity” warning during setup, that is usually the certificate name not quite matching the server address you typed. It is often harmless, but it is also exactly what a misconfiguration looks like, so it is worth having someone confirm rather than tapping through it out of habit.
Make sent mail and drafts sync
This is the step people skip, and then wonder why their sent messages are missing.
By default your phone may keep Sent, Drafts, and Deleted messages on the device rather than on the server. Reply to a client from your phone and that reply simply will not appear in Sent on your laptop, which is maddening when you are trying to find out what you promised somebody.
In the account’s advanced settings, set the Sent, Drafts, and Deleted mailboxes to the matching folders on the server rather than on the phone. Everything then lines up wherever you read it.
When it is worth asking
Email is one of those things that either works invisibly or eats an afternoon. If an account will not connect, if messages are landing in spam, or if you are moving a whole team across to new addresses, that is usually the point to hand it over rather than keep poking at it.
Looking after business email is part of what we do, and we are happy to sort out the settings so you can get on with your day.