Configure iPhone or iPad for SWCP Email

Updated for iOS 14 (on April 12 2021). Please email help@swcp.com if this article needs to be updated.

Email Account Setup Prerequisites

There are several ways configure your iPhone for email. The following describes the method that will work best with SWCP's mail servers.

Use IMAP, not POP

In almost every scenario, IMAP is considered superior to POP. If you will be accessing your mailbox from multiple locations at the same time, IMAP will work best. Remember that if your desktop computer is configured to check for mail every 10 minutes, and you are out and about checking mail on your iphone, there will be times when your phone and computer try to hit the mailbox at the same time. IMAP supports this, but POP does not.

SWCP does not support email over Exchange.

How to add your SWCP email account

1. Open the "Settings" app on your iPhone or iPad
2. Go to "Mail"
3. Tap on "Accounts"
4. Tap on "Add Account"
5. Tap on "Other"
6. Then tap on "Add Mail Account"
   1. Fill in the "Name". This is the same name others will see when you send them an email.
   2. Fill in the "Email". This is the same email others will reply to when you send them an email.
   3. Fill in the "Password". If you do not know your email password. Please contact our technical support team.
   4. Fill in the "Description". We recommend using your full email address as the description.
7. Once you fill those four fields, hit "Next"

You will then see additional fields that will need to be filled in.

Warning

The Username and Password fields are NOT optional, even if iOS claims it is

1. Make sure "IMAP" is selected at the top of the screen
2. The Name, Email, and Description should appear as you entered them on the previous page, only change them if there are any typos
3. Under "INCOMING MAIL SERVER"
   1. Set the "Host Name" to: mail.swcp.com
   2. Enter your SWCP username in the User Name field (this name may be different from your email address)
   3. Your SWCP password should already be entered, from the previous page
4. Under "OUTGOING MAIL SERVER"
   1. Set the "Host Name" to: mail.swcp.com
   2. Enter your SWCP username in the User Name field (this name may be different from your email address)
   3. You need to enter the password again here
5. Tap "Next", and on the next screen tap "Save"

Now you can leave the Settings app and open the Mail app to use this account.

Testing your email account

The easiest way to see if email flows both in and out is to send yourself an email from the SWCP account to the SWCP account.

If your receive your test email, then your email is functioning correctly.

How to adjust the Advanced Settings

For almost all email accounts, this is not necessary to do. However, if you accidentally adjusted something in the "Advanced Settings" you might want to know how to change the settings back to a working state.

• Open the "Settings" app on your iPhone or iPad
• Go to "Password & Accounts" on the left-hand side
• Tap on your SWCP account
• Tap on "Account"
• Tap on "SMTP"

Now you can adjust the outgoing mail server advanced settings.

• Make sure that "Server" at the top is enabled
• "Host Name" needs to be set to: mail.swcp.com
• Make sure username is spelt correctly and does not have an @ sign or anyhthing else after the @ sign
• Make sure you have the correct password as well
• Turn on the "Use SSL" button
• Make sure that "Authentication" is set to Password
• Make sure that "Server Port" is set to 587
• Tap on "Done" once complete.

• Tap on "Advanced" (at the bottom)

Now you can adjust the incoming mail server advanced settings.

• "Drafts Mailbox" can be set to Drafts
• "Sent Mailbox" can be set to Sent
• "Deleted Mailbox" can be set to Trash
• "Archive Mailbox" can be set to Archive (if one exists)
• Set "Move Discarded Messages Into" to Deleted Mailbox
• "Remove" can be set to After one week
• Turn on the "Use SSL" button
• "Authentication" needs to be set to Password
• "IMAP Path Prefix" needs to be empty
• "Server Port" needs to be set to 993

Removing a non-functional email account

Please ignore this section if you are adding an SWCP email account for the first time.

If there are issues with your SWCP email account such as: Inbox has old email, cannot send email, or getting a invalid password error that doesn't go away. Then you might want to consider removing your SWCP email account so you can then re-add the SWCP email account. Continue reading.

Verify if you can safely remove the email account

If you are planning on removing your SWCP email account from your iPhone or iPad. Please check to see if the account was setup as IMAP or POP. IMAP is safe to remove since IMAP will continusly syncronize with the email server, thus you can restore your email easily. However, POP will typically default to remove email on the email server after a certain amount of days. So you might not be able to completely restore your POP email account without manually backing up these emails.

• Open the "Settings" app on your iPhone or iPad
• Go to: "Mail"
• Select: "Accounts"
• Click on your SWCP email account
• Then select "Account"
• Above the "Account" line, there will be mention of either IMAP or POP

If the email account shows IMAP, you can remove the email account from your iPhone or iPad without loss of data.

If the email account shows it's using POP, then you need to backup the email before removing the email account. At the time of writing there are no backup utilities to automatically do this for you. You might have to add a second email account that uses IMAP and move the emails into that IMAP email account.

How to remove the SWCP IMAP email account

If you have not already verified that the SWCP email account is an IMAP email account and NOT a POP email account, then please read Verify if you can safely remove the email account above.

• Open the "Settings" app on your iPhone or iPad
• Go to: "Mail"
• Select: "Accounts"
• Click on your SWCP email account
• At the bottom, select: "Delete Account"

Now you have removed your SWCP email account.

If you want to re-add the SWCP IMAP email account, please read How to add your SWCP email account below.

Deleting Messages

Determining how messages will be deleted is important. It's irritating to read email on your iPhone, then go back to the office and have to wade through the same messages. You want to be able to delete messages from the iPhone and have your desktop email program recognize those deletions. This is an area where IMAP is essential. In the "Advanced Settings" for your iPhone mail account, you have these options to affect how messages are deleted:

• "Deleted mailbox" - can be "On My iPhone" or a named folder on the server. If it's "On My iPhone" the deleted messages get copied to a folder named Trash on your phone. DO NOT USE THIS OPTION.

• If "Deleted Mailbox" is set to a folder on the server (e.g. "Deleted Messages") then when you delete a message from any folder it gets COPIED to the "Deleted Messages" folder, *and* marked as "deleted" in the original folder.

When you go into the INBOX or other folders with your desktop client or webmail, the messages you deleted from the iphone will still be visible there, but marked "deleted". If you "Empty Trash" they'll get really deleted from the folder. A copy of them will still be in the "Deleted Messages" folder.

There's one more important setting on the iPhone: the "Remove" setting. It can be "After one day", "week", or "month". This controls how long the iPhone will leave messages in the "Deleted Messages" folder. "1 week" is a good setting. Every time you check mail from the iPhone, it nukes messages older than a week from the "Deleted Messages" folder. If you get a lot of large email attachments and delete from the iPhone, this could be a problem because of the disk space needed for the "Deleted Messages" folder. You could use a shorter period (1 day), or buy more disk space, or just resist the urge to delete those messages from the iphone.

Oh, one more thing: in order to select the "Deleted Messages" folder in the advanced settings, the folder had to be created ahead of time. You can create the folder in webmail, or using the IMAP client on your desktop computer (Thunderbird, mail.app, Outlook, etc.)

The IMAP Folder Problem

The IMAP server keeps a list of your "subscribed" folders. That is, files in your directory which are mail folders. That way most IMAP clients (like Outlook or Thunderbird or RoundCube webmail) know which files in your home directory to display as mail folders, and they ignore the rest. However, the iPhone ignores this subscription list and displays ALL the files it finds. This is irritating for a couple of different reasons, but there doesn't seem to be any fix for it, as of iPhone OS 3.x. Perhaps they'll fix it in 4.0 nope 5.0 nope 6.0 nope 7.0 nope 8.0 nope

For some people this is no big deal. You just see a few extra files and you can mentally ignore them. For others, it's a big problem. For example, if your home directory also has a large web site stored, it might actually prevent the iPhone from being able to function, because it times out waiting for the huge (and useless!) file list to transfer.

Here are a couple of workarounds:

• [SWCP Only] Switch to maildir - at SWCP this issue does not affect accounts that are on our newer mail servers which use the "maildir" format for storing messages outside the user's home directory.
  • NB: If we change an account to maildir to fix this problem, you then need to delete the account from the device and re-add it. That seems to be the only way to get it to "forget" all those bogus folders that it saw.
• Only use INBOX - to do this, set Advanced -> Incoming Settings -> IMAP Path Prefix to the word "INBOX" (all capitals, no punctuation). Now when you access mail in this account, it will only show you your INBOX, and not any other IMAP folders that you might have. If you primarily use your phone to look at incoming mail and don't mind waiting until you are at your main computer to file messages into folders, this might work for you. But it means you can't access old messages that you previously filed into folders.
• Put folders in a subdirectory - to do this, create a subdirectory in your home directory on the SWCP server called "mail". In that directory create symbolic links to your folders one level up. Set the IMAP Path Prefix on the iPhone to the word "mail". Now the iPhone will only see those folders. (This won't disturb other IMAP clients you may be using such as Thunderbird, Outlook, or webmail). If you want to do this, please ask help@swcp.com to set it up for you. We'll take care of creating the directory and required links.

See Also

• Using Multiple Identities in iPhone Mail
• Configure K-9 on Android for SWCP Email