How to - Set up Gmail on your smartphone
Candice Jones

We’ve all known the frustration of not being able to access our e-mail when away from the PC. Well, stress no more. Just pick it up on your smartphone.

Most of us get itchy fingers when we’re away from our home or office PCs for a few days, wondering whether there’s an important mail waiting in the inbox. Logging onto your mail from an internet café is not always the safest means to communicate, and the last thing you want to do is haul out that laptop and 3G card while sipping piña coladas on the Durban beachfront.

Enter the smartphone. This little device has eliminated the bulk and enabled always-on access to e-mail and the internet, useful for those ad-hock Google searches to quell arguments in the pub. But setting up mail on the smartphone can sometimes be a little complicated.

Really all that is needed is the right information and a little help, and since most people own a Gmail account, it’s a good place to start.

First step is to log on to your Gmail account on a PC. In the top right corner of the screen is a settings link. You have to allow Gmail to send your e-mail somewhere else. Once permission has been given, mail will go to the phone as well as the regular inbox.

Once in the settings section, select “forwarding and POP” and make sure to select the button for “enable POP for all mail”. Don’t forget to hit “save changes”.

On the smartphone, there are several ways to start and each phone will have a different method. Usually by simply selecting the mail icon, it will ask if you want to set up an “existing account” - say yes.
For any device, the basic information will always be the same. You’ll need the username and password you use when accessing your e-mail online. And knowing the actual e-mail address will be useful too. That’s usually the first bit to fill in.

The phone will also require a little more complicated information. To send mail from the phone, you’ll need to know the name of the sending server (POP). The same applies to receiving mail (SMTP). All big names for something very simple, and luckily, Gmail has all that information handy.

When your phone asks for the name of a POP server, enter `pop.gmail.com’. When it asks for an SMTP server, enter `smtp.gmail.com’.
On a Blackberry, there is often an annoying message that gets added to every e-mail, which you can stop while setting up the account. We’re talking about the option to add a signature, which usually contains the phrase “Sent from my Blackberry”.  Delete this in the same screen display where it asks for all the other information.

iPhone users are a little luckier. They will have access to a Gmail application on the phone already and will only need to include the username and password – nifty.
For those not using Gmail, check the help section of any online mail service to see what the server details are, and simply use those instead.