I want different email icons

[Android Question]

I came from a windows 8 phone. One nice feature I liked about that phone is I could have different icons for my different email accounts. One icon was for my work account and the other my personal email account. The Android seems to put all my email accounts under one icon.

Is there a way to separate them? I want one email icon for work with a sound notification. A second Icon for home without sound notification?

 

[tommo47]

Hi, it certainly isn't a lack of functionality within Android per se, as on both my HTC devices I can create a separate mail icon for each account for both the stock mail app and the gmail app, and choose a different notification sound for each account - including silent.

The icons are created by adding the appropriate 'shortcut' to a home screen - Gmail label for gmail accounts and Mail inbox for stock mail app accounts. Selecting different notification sounds is done in the 'settings' for each individual account.

Hope this helps.

 

[Hadron]

Both of these are possible. If your pre-installed mail app won't do it, you can install one from the Play Store that will. I use Kaiten Mail as my email client, which is a paid version of the free K9 Mail app, so am using this as an example, but there will probably be others that will let you do this too.

If I open Kaiten and look at its settings, it has Account Settings with Notifications as one of the options. So I can set different notifications for different accounts, and hence could have one with an audible notification and one with a silent notification or none.

I've only got one email account set up on my phone (I don't want my work accounts on there), so can't test this, but I just tried adding a shortcut to my desktop and one of the options was "Kaiten Mail Accounts", and selecting that let me choose to set an icon which took me directly to a specific account's inbox or the unified (all accounts together) inbox. So I figure that if I set up a second account I could also have separate icons for each.

If you use a third-party launcher as well you could also edit the icons after creating them so that the two look different as well as taking you to different inboxes. Some launchers (e.g. Nova or Apex) can also add badges which tell you how many unread mails there are (with an add-on in the case of those 2 launchers).