[jhollington]

Originally Posted by camner

OK, this is much clearer! Thanks. I didn't know about the "tap on the CC/BCC From:" trick.

Yeah, it's a little hidden, but it's definitely a handy one. It also works to choose which "identity" you want to use when you have multiple "From" addresses configured for a single account.

But, that leads to one final question...clearly when there are multiple accounts configured in iOS, it chooses ONE of them to be the default account to send from when using sharing tools. How does one choose that default account?

Go into the Mail section in the iOS Settings app and scroll down to the very bottom — below "Signature" you should see "Default Account" and you can choose it from there (note that this option only appears if you have more than one Mail account configured in the first place).

{[i]Not that it matters, but the original reason I set things up the way I did dates back to before the release of the Fastmail app for iOS. I have lots of folders set up and iOS Mail's way of navigating between IMAP folders is cumbersome, to say the least.

While I'm not sure what you mean by "cumbersome" in your specific situation, you might want to take a closer look at Mail in more recent iOS versions, as there have been some nice improvements. For example, since iOS 7 you've been able to "pin" certain folders to appear up in the top of the list, right alongside your inbox and other system folders, as well as enabling "smart folders" at the top (to show you only unread messages, flagged messages, or messages with attachments, for instance). Also, iOS 10 added proper "full account" message threading so that you can now see a whole conversation thread regardless of which folders individual messages in the thread have been filed into. iOS 10 also added the ability to automatically suggest the most likely folder when moving messages (so if you're always filing receipts from Amazon into a "Receipts" folder, it will learn that behaviour and just offer up "Move to Receipts" as an initial choice when you choose to move any message that it recognizes as an Amazon receipt).

Further, FastMail implemented full iOS "push" support last year, and this supports not only the Inbox, but any sub-folder you wish to designate, allowing you to have messages that have been filed into or received into other folders to also be pushed to your iOS device.

So, I took the following, rather Rube Goldbergian, approach .... This works, but is too complex for my taste and depends on my being available to configure all the family's iPhones and iPads this way!

Yeah, that's definitely complex, but it also sounds like what a lot of people did back in the early days of iOS Mail — most often just to get proper "push" support for new mail. I'm not sure of your specific reasons for doing this, but I honestly can't see why you'd need to do this now over just using the native Mail app or FastMail app.

In other words, even if you're going to continue using the FastMail app, I'd suggest just configuring your iOS Mail settings to connect directly to FastMail over IMAP/SMTP and take Gmail right out of the equation.

In my case, while I keep the FastMail app on my iPhone for certain specific use cases*— mostly easy access to preferences and more advanced searches — I've found the iOS Mail app meets all of my daily email management needs, particularly with the many little improvements Apple has made it in over the past few iOS releases.