Email and Messaging

The "out-of-office" reply is a commonly used automatic email reply that lets people know you will be away from your email for an amount of time, so they won't think you are ignoring them. Just about every email client has this tool, including one of the most popular - Gmail. Apple Mail and other email managers sometimes don't let you set up out-of-office responses. For Apple Mail you'd have to do it in a roundabout way, setting up rules on your desktop Mail app. It's a better idea to set it up at the source.

There are many apps that will manage your email accounts besides the iOS Mail app - Thunderbird, Outlook and Gmail will all do the job, to name a few. Outlook is popular with a lot of businesses, so if your work email is managed by Outlook you might want to add your other emails just to be able to access them all in one place. Or maybe you prefer the Outlook interface to that of Mail.

Gmail offers a lot of interesting features such as Smart Replies, Undo Send and more, but it can be a bit confusing at times. Sometimes features work across different platforms and sometimes they don't. If you set up a personal signature on your laptop it will not appear in emails within the app and vice versa. You can also not see your signature while writing an email in the Gmail app, but you can on the desktop version. You will need to set up your signature separately within the app and at gmail.com if you want it to appear while switching platforms. Here's how:

Nothing is worse than forgetting an important password. Except maybe forgetting all of your sign in credentials completely. Without the email address associated with your Apple ID, the account cannot be accessed. The good news is Apple makes it possible to look up a lost Apple ID. In the worst case scenario, finding a forgotten Apple ID takes trial and error.

Sometimes you'll receive a group message that includes a person not listed in your Contacts. This person will be represented by a a stock icon instead of an icon image you assigned. You can easily add this person's personal information to your Contacts app from a group message in a few simple steps. Adding a person to your Contacts app makes it easier to locate their information in the future. It will also allow you to search your phone for that person, or use Siri to call or message that person at any time. Here's how to add a Contact to a group message: