How to Set Up K9 Mail on Android Phone

If you are like me and have several email accounts, being able to unify all your incoming emails into one unified inbox makes life just a little easier.  For the past several months I have been using the Mail app from Dropbox.  I am pretty satisfied with the app and have very few complaints.  The UI of the app is a little boring, but the app is very stable and reliable. I decided to give the K9 app a try to see if it does a better job for me.  I noticed that the UI is a little nicer than the Mail UI.  Another difference between the two is that it's a little harder to add email accounts to the K9 app than it is with the Mail app.  If you are using the Mail app just add the user name and password.  With K9, if you are using a regular gmail account then you will encounter no problems.  Just type in your user name and password and the app will automatically set up your account.  But if you are like me, and have an email account associated with a paid Google Apps account, you will run into problems.  Simply including your user name and password will not work.  You have to manually configure the details in order to get the app to sync your Apps email account.  Here's what you have to do:

1.  Install the K9 app from the Google Play Store;

2.  Open the K9 app and manually set up your personal email account as the default account by simply         adding your personal email account details;

3.  Now you can add your Google Apps email account.  Start by clicking the "+" button.  Type in your full email address and password. Click "next" and choose "IMAP."  

4.  This is where it gets tricky.  Here's what you should change the settings to.

     Incoming server settings     

     Username:        Name@(Your Domain).com

     Password:        Make sure password is correct

     IMAP Server:  imap.gmail.com

     Security:          SSL/TLS (always)  

     Authentication: Plain

     Port:                993

     Outgoing server settings

     SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com

     Security:         STARTTLS (always)

     Port:               587

5.  Click next and set up your individual preferences.

And that's it.  Obviously, I only talked about Gmail accounts.  I only use Gmail accounts.  I have a couple of old Hotmail accounts and a Yahoo email account that I have synced with my personal Gmail account. I no longer use my Hotmail or Yahoo email account so I have not tried to set up those accounts on K9 so I don't know if you can even do it.

Anyway, let me know how it goes in the comments below.  I would be interested to see what you think about K9 and Mail.