How to Read, Send and Delete Email on Android

This guide shows you how to read, send and delete email on an Android phone or tablet using the Gmail app. It covers opening and reading messages, switching between accounts, viewing all your inboxes in one list, composing and sending, replying, attaching files, deleting messages, controlling new-mail notifications, and refreshing your inbox when messages are slow to arrive. It applies whether you use a Gmail address or a mailbox at your own domain, a mailbox is sometimes called an email account, and the Gmail app can display both types side by side.

The single most important thing in this guide is the section on what deleting a message on your phone actually does on the mail server. On a mailbox hosted with Noiz that one behaviour decides whether a deleted message is gone from every device you own, or still sitting safely in webmail. Google's documentation explains the buttons; this guide explains the consequences on your hosting account, the decisions you have to make, and how to prove to yourself that it worked.

Last reviewed: 27 July 2026, against the current Gmail for Android release. This guide is written for Noiz hosting and is kept current against Gmail for Android. It complements, and does not replace, the official Gmail documentation linked below.

Official Documentation Reference

• Sign in to Gmail (Android): signing in and adding a Google account
• Add another email account (Android): adding accounts, switching, and All inboxes
• Send or unsend Gmail messages (Android): composing, sending, replying and forwarding
• Send attachments with your Gmail message (Android): attaching files and size limits
• Delete messages in Gmail (Android): deleting, Trash, and recovering deleted mail
• Archive Gmail messages (Android): how archiving differs from deleting
• Change Gmail notifications (Android): notification levels, sounds, and label alerts
• Fix sync errors with the Gmail app (Android): refreshing the inbox and repairing sync
• RFC 9051: Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), version 4rev2: the standard that defines server-side mailbox behaviour
• RFC 1939: Post Office Protocol, version 3 (POP3): the standard that defines download-and-remove behaviour

Prerequisites

• An Android phone or tablet with the Gmail app installed and up to date (update it from the Play Store if unsure).
• A working mailbox and its password. If your email is hosted with Noiz on a Plesk plan and the mailbox does not exist yet, first create an email address in Plesk.
• The mailbox already added to the device. If it is not, work through how to set up email on Android first.
• An active internet connection (Wi-Fi or mobile data).

Open and Read Your Email

1. Unlock your device and open the Gmail app.
2. The app opens in the inbox of the account you last used. Unread messages appear in bold, with the newest at the top.
3. Tap any message to open and read it. Attachments appear at the bottom of the message, tap one to preview or download it.
4. Tap the back arrow in the top left to return to your inbox.

Switch Between Accounts

If you have more than one account in the Gmail app, for example a personal Gmail address plus a mailbox at your own domain, you can move between them without signing out.

Switch to Another Account

1. Open the Gmail app.
2. In the top right, tap your Profile picture (or your initial, if you have not set a picture).
3. In the panel that opens, tap the account you want to view.
4. The inbox reloads and shows that account's mail. Repeat the same steps to switch back.

View All Your Inboxes in One List

1. Open the Gmail app.
2. In the top left, tap the Menu icon (three horizontal lines).
3. Tap All inboxes. Mail from every account on the device now appears in a single combined list, and each message shows which account it belongs to.

Add Another Account to the Gmail App

If the account you want to read is not on the device yet:

1. In the top right, tap your Profile picture, then tap Add another account.
2. For a Gmail address, choose Google and follow the sign-in prompts.
3. For a mailbox at your own domain, choose Other, enter the full address, for example [email protected] (an example only, replace it with your real address), tap Next, choose Personal (IMAP), enter the mailbox password, and follow the on-screen steps. The incoming and outgoing server settings for a Noiz-hosted mailbox are shown in your hosting control panel and in your welcome email.

That Personal (IMAP) versus Personal (POP3) choice is the most consequential tap in the whole setup, and it is easy to make once and forget about for years. It decides what happens every time you delete a message, and it is explained in full further down this guide.

Send, Reply and Forward Mail

Compose and Send a New Message

1. Open the Gmail app and make sure the account you want to send from is the one showing (see Switch Between Accounts above).
2. Tap Compose, the pencil button in the bottom right.
3. In the To field, type the recipient's address. To copy other people in, tap the small chevron at the end of the To row to reveal Cc and Bcc.
4. Fill in Subject, then type your message in the body.
5. Tap Send, the paper-plane icon in the top right.

Check Which Address the Message Is Coming From

This is the most common avoidable mistake on a phone with more than one account, and it costs you replies rather than throwing an error.

• The From line at the top of the compose screen shows the sending address. If only one account is on the device the line is often hidden, tap the From row or the chevron to reveal and change it.
• If you started composing from the All inboxes view, Gmail picks your default account rather than the one whose message you were just reading. Always glance at the From line before tapping Send.
• The address in From is the address your recipient sees and the address their reply goes to. A quote sent from a personal Gmail address instead of [email protected] looks less credible, and the reply lands in a mailbox nobody at the business is watching.
• Replying to an existing message always uses the account that received it, so replies are safe. Only new messages are at risk.

Attach a File

1. In the compose screen, tap the paperclip icon in the top toolbar.
2. Choose Attach file to pick something from the device (Downloads, Photos, Documents), or Insert from Drive to send a link to a file in Google Drive instead of the file itself.
3. The attachment appears as a chip below the subject line. Tap the X on the chip to remove it before sending.

Size is the gotcha, not the procedure. Google caps a Gmail message at 25 MB, and most receiving mail servers apply a ceiling in the same region. Mail attachments are encoded for transport, which inflates them by roughly a third, so a 20 MB video leaves your phone as a message of about 27 MB and can bounce even though the file itself was under the limit. Phone cameras produce files that cross this line easily.

If a large file has to go out, upload it somewhere and send the link, or compress it first. A bounce for an oversized attachment can take minutes or hours to come back, so by the time you know it failed the recipient has been waiting all morning.

Reply and Forward

1. Open the message.
2. Tap Reply (the single curved arrow) to answer the sender only, Reply all (the double arrow) to answer everyone on the message, or open the three-dot menu and tap Forward to pass it on to somebody new.
3. Type your text above the quoted original and tap Send.

Two things worth knowing on a small screen. Reply and Reply all sit next to each other and are easy to confuse in a hurry, so check the recipient chips before sending anything you would not want the whole distribution list to read. And Forward carries the original attachments with it, which is convenient until you forward a thread that contains something further down that you had not scrolled to.

Confirm the Message Actually Went

Right after you tap Send, a short confirmation appears at the bottom of the screen with an Undo option. Once that disappears the message is on its way.

For a mailbox at your own domain the real proof is server-side. Open Menu, tap Sent, and confirm the message is listed. Then sign in to webmail in a browser on any device and check that the same message is in the Sent folder there. If it is in webmail, the message reached your mail server and left it. If the phone shows it as sent but webmail does not, the account is almost certainly set up as POP3 rather than IMAP, which is covered next. Depending on the control panel on your plan, see accessing email from Plesk webmail or accessing email from cPanel webmail.

Delete Mail, and What That Does on the Server

Deleting on a phone is two taps. Understanding where the message went is the part that saves you from ringing support about a contract you thought you still had.

Delete a Single Message

1. Open the Gmail app and go to the inbox holding the message.
2. Press and hold the message for a second. It becomes selected and a toolbar appears at the top of the screen.
3. Tap the bin icon in that toolbar. You can also open the message first and tap the bin at the top.
4. A short confirmation appears at the bottom of the screen with an Undo option. Tapping Undo straight away puts the message back. Wait a few seconds and the option disappears.

Delete Several Messages at Once

1. Press and hold the first message to select it.
2. Single-tap each additional message you want to remove. The counter at the top of the toolbar shows how many are selected.
3. Tap the bin icon once. All of them go together, and a single Undo restores the whole batch.

Swiping a message sideways is quicker, but check what your swipe is set to do before you rely on it. Under Menu, Settings, General settings, Swipe actions, you can assign the left and right swipe to Archive, Delete, Mark as read, Move to or Snooze. People clear an inbox for months on the assumption they are deleting, then discover the mail was being archived all along, or the reverse.

Archive Is Not Delete

Archive takes a message out of the inbox and leaves it on the server, findable through search or the All Mail or archive folder. Delete moves it to Trash, which is a staging area before it is destroyed. Archiving keeps a message, and keeps it counting against your mailbox space. Deleting is a decision to lose it.

The Part That Matters: IMAP Versus POP3

When the mailbox was added to the phone, it was set up as either IMAP or POP3. Those two protocols treat your phone completely differently, and nothing on the delete screen tells you which one you have.

IMAP treats the server as the master copy. Your phone is a window onto the mailbox that lives on the mail server. Every action you take is sent back to the server, so deleting a message on the phone deletes it on the server, and it then vanishes from webmail, from your laptop, from your tablet and from anywhere else that mailbox is open, as each of them syncs. This is the correct behaviour and it is what almost everyone wants, but it surprises people the first time.

POP3 treats your phone as the destination. It downloads copies of messages and then, depending on a setting chosen at setup, either leaves the originals on the server or removes them. Deleting a downloaded message on the phone removes the phone's copy. Whether the server copy also goes depends entirely on the Delete email from server option in the account's settings, which is typically set to either Never or When I delete from Inbox.

The practical difference:

Unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise, use IMAP for a Noiz-hosted mailbox. It keeps every device showing the same mailbox, it keeps your mail on a backed-up server rather than on a phone, and it makes replacing a handset a non-event. POP3 is worth choosing only when you deliberately want mail pulled down to one machine and off the server, for example to work within a small mailbox quota.

Work Out Which One Your Phone Is Using

The quickest tell is the folder list. Open Menu and scroll down.

• IMAP: you see the mailbox's real server folders, typically Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Trash, Junk or Spam, plus any folders you created in webmail. Folders you make in webmail appear on the phone, and that is the giveaway.
• POP3: you see a short, purely local set such as Inbox, Outbox, Sent and Trash, and nothing you created in webmail ever shows up.

The definitive test takes a minute. Send yourself a test message, delete it on the phone, then open webmail in a browser. If it has gone from the webmail inbox and turned up in the webmail Trash, you are on IMAP. If it is still sitting in the webmail inbox, you are on POP3.

To switch a POP3 account to IMAP, remove the account from the phone and add it again choosing Personal (IMAP). Before you remove it, check whether any mail exists only on that phone, because removing a POP3 account takes its downloaded messages with it.

Recover a Message You Deleted by Mistake

1. If the Undo confirmation is still on screen, tap it. That is the easy path.
2. Otherwise open Menu, tap Trash, press and hold the message, then use Move to and pick Inbox.
3. If the phone is not showing it, look in the Trash folder in webmail. On an IMAP mailbox that is the same folder, and it is often faster to work with on a full-size screen.

Trash is not permanent storage. For a Google account, messages in Trash are destroyed automatically after 30 days. For a mailbox at your own domain, messages stay in the server Trash folder until you empty it. Either way, emptying Trash is final, and there is no per-message undo after that point.

Emptying Trash and Your Mailbox Quota

On a hosted mailbox this catches people out. Trash and Junk are ordinary folders on the mail server and their contents count towards the mailbox size limit on your hosting plan. Deleting thousands of messages on your phone frees nothing until the Trash folder is emptied, and a mailbox that hits its limit starts rejecting incoming mail with the sender getting a bounce. Open Menu, tap Trash, then tap Empty trash now at the top of the list, and do the same for Spam or Junk.

Manage New Mail Notifications

Notifications alert you to new mail without opening the app.

Turn Gmail Notifications On or Off

1. Open the Gmail app, tap the Menu icon, then tap Settings.
2. Tap General settings, then Manage notifications.
3. Turn All Gmail notifications on or off. From this screen you can also choose a notification sound, or select None to silence alerts.

Choose Which Emails Notify You

1. Open the Gmail app, tap the Menu icon, then tap Settings.
2. Tap the account you want to change.
3. Tap Email notifications and pick a level: All (every new message), High priority only (messages Gmail marks as important), or None.

Notifications only work while Sync Gmail is turned on for the account, see the next section if alerts have stopped arriving.

Refresh Your Inbox When Mail Seems Slow

1. From the top of your inbox, swipe down. A refresh icon appears briefly while Gmail checks for new mail.
2. Allow time for delivery: syncing can take up to 15 minutes, and longer if the device has not been used for a while.

Check That Sync Is Turned On

1. Open the Gmail app, tap the Menu icon, then tap Settings.
2. Tap the account.
3. Under Data usage, make sure the box next to Sync Gmail is ticked. If it was unticked, new mail only arrives when you open the app and refresh manually.

Troubleshooting

• New mail only appears when you open the app: turn Sync Gmail back on under Settings, your account, Data usage, and check that Email notifications is not set to None.
• Swiping down does not load new messages: confirm the device is online by opening a website in a browser such as Chrome, update the Gmail app from the Play Store, then restart the device.
• Mail has stopped arriving entirely: check your storage. A full Google Account (storage is shared across Gmail and other Google services) stops messages from sending and receiving, and the app also stops syncing when the device itself is low on space. On a mailbox at your own domain, check the mailbox is not at its quota, and empty Trash and Junk if it is. Delete messages with large attachments and remove unused apps or downloaded files.
• Gmail keeps asking for a password: if you recently changed the mailbox password, enter the new one when prompted. For a mailbox at your own domain, removing the account and adding it again with the new password is the quickest fix.
• A message sits in Outbox and never sends: the outgoing (SMTP) side is failing while the incoming side works, so the inbox looks healthy. Confirm the outgoing server settings match your welcome email, that authentication is enabled for outgoing mail using the same username and password as incoming, and that the port is the submission port your mail server expects rather than port 25, which many mobile networks block outright. Toggling from mobile data to Wi-Fi is a fast way to prove a network block.
• Recipients reply to the wrong address: you sent from the wrong account. Check the From line before sending, especially when composing from the All inboxes view.
• An attachment bounces: the encoded message exceeded a size limit at your server or the recipient's. Send a link to the file instead, or compress it.
• Sent mail does not appear in webmail: the account is set up as POP3, so sent copies are staying on the phone. Re-add the account as Personal (IMAP).
• Deleting on the phone also deleted it on the laptop: that is IMAP working correctly, both devices are looking at the same server mailbox. Recover the message from the Trash folder in webmail.
• Deleted messages keep coming back: another device is set up as POP3 and re-downloading mail that is still on the server, or the delete never reached the server because the phone was offline. Put every device on IMAP so they all agree.
• Nothing above helps: as a last resort, clear the app's stored data under your device's Settings, Apps, Gmail, Storage & cache, Clear storage, then restart the device and sign in again. Note that this removes unsaved drafts and app settings stored on the device, and on a POP3 account it removes downloaded mail that exists nowhere else.

If you get stuck, open a support ticket with the Noiz support team and include the email address involved, whether it is set up as IMAP or POP3, and exactly what happens when you send, delete or refresh, and a technician will help you get your mail working properly on Android.