Email and Messaging

One of the most common gripes from iPhone owners is the lack of native copy and paste functionality. Though the topic has been often discussed, until now, no actual solution has ever arrived. Thanks to coder Preston Monroe, this functionality is now available on the iPhone in the form of a Safari bookmarklet. Named iCopy by Monroe, the bookmarklet provides the ability to copy and paste text within Safari or copy text and paste directly into email.

A number of users who have upgraded and jailbroken 1.1.4 are reporting that the Mail application stops working properly after the upgrade and/or jailbreak is complete. These reports of a broken Mail.app come in a variety of forms. For some users, Mail crashes when they attempt to open it. For others, it simply fails to download any new messages. Still, for others, Mail crashes when attempting to read a message.

Regardless of the particular symptoms your Mail is experiencing, should your Mail.app be broken after upgrading and/or jailbreaking 1.1.4, here are some possible fixes:

When sending photos and links from your iPhone, the iPhone will always use your default email address.

Your default address is determined in your Mail settings. To change your default account, go to

Settings -> Mail -> Default Account (all the way at the bottom)

You may not want to see the little preview of text messages that turn up on your home screen when a new text (SMS) message comes in. To turn this off, head to your iPhone settings and go to:

General -> Passcode Lock -> Show SMS Preview

Turning off 'Show SMS Preview' will disable the text message preview on your iPhone. You'll still get an alert that the message came in, including the sender's name/number, but none of the message will appear.

Google has recently added IMAP as an available protocol for their GMail. This is a long awaited feature for GMail users (not just GMail iPhone users) as it allows for true synchronization between GMail and offline mail readers.

Google has offered two sources of easy to follow instructions, a text version and a video, for setting up GMail reading via IMAP on the iPhone. Both are copied below:

Unfortunately, at this point, there isn't.

For the time being, you're left with one of two options, each which delete only one message at a time:

1) tap the EDIT button then use the minus+confirm DELETE
2) swipe your finger across the subject/teaser of the message you want to erase and confirm DELETE

Hopefully a multiple delete or delete all feature is coming in a firmware update to the iPhone.

The native iPhone SMS interface, as of firmware 1.1.2, does not provide the ability to forward SMS text messages.

Update (12/28/2007): Using a new third-party application for the iPhone, iSMS (or weiSMS), it is now possible to send text messages to multiple individuals as well as forward text messages. Find out more here.

The native iPhone SMS interface, as of firmware 1.1.2, does not provide the ability to send SMS text messages to multiple recipients (bulk SMS).

Update (12/28/2007): Using a new third-party application for the iPhone, iSMS (or weiSMS), it is now possible to send text messages to multiple individuals as well as forward text messages. Find out more here.

Though not offered by all free email providers (i.e. Hotmail), Google offers external email reading via the POP3 protocol as part of the Gmail service.

Setting up your iPhone to read your Gmail is fairly simple.

First, insure that POP is enabled in your Gmail account. Go into your Gmail settings and click on the "Forwarding and POP" tab. Once inside, enable POP access (for either new mail or all mail, it's up to you).

One of the most perplexing feature omissions from the iPhone was the lack of support for the MMS protocol. One can only assume that this was a deliberate choice by Apple, though it is hard to determine why.

Many users who are accustomed to snapping photos w/ their camera phones and sending those photos to friends and family via text/MMS messaging have been surprised to find out they can't do the same with their iPhone.

Thankfully, due to iPhone's email capabilities - there is a workaround.