How to Receive (or Not) Messages in Your iPad's Mail App

By Edward C. Baig and Bob LeVitus from iPad For Dummies, 5th Edition

With iOS 6 on your third-generation iPad, you have the choice to receive or not receive instant messages. If you don’t want any messages, you can turn iMessages off. The Do Not Disturb that arrived with iOS 6 lives up to its name.

Flip the switch in Settings so the setting is turned On and you see a moon icon in the status bar. And you won’t be inundated with messages.

If you decide you want to receive messages, first decide whether you want to hear an alert when you receive a message:

If you want to hear an alert sound when you receive a message, tap the Settings icon on your Home screen, tap Sounds→Text Tone, and then tap one of the available sounds. You can audition the sounds by tapping them. If you have a Mac, you can create your own text tones in GarageBand.

You hear the sounds when you audition them in the Settings app, even if you have the ring/silent switch set to Silent. After you exit the Settings app, however, you won’t hear a sound when a message arrives if the ring/silent switch is set to Silent.
If you don’t want to hear an alert when a message arrives, instead of tapping one of the listed sounds, tap the first item in the list: None.

The following pointers explain what you can do with iMessages that you receive:

Receiving a message when your iPad is asleep: All or part of the text and the name of the sender appear on the Unlock screen. Slide any of the green message icons to the right to reply to a specific message as with the first message.
Receiving a message when your iPad is awake and unlocked: All or part of the message and the name of the sender appear at the top of the screen in front of whatever’s already there. If what’s already there is your Home screen, you’ll notice that the Messages icon displays the number of unread messages.

All these notifications are on by default; turn them off in the Settings app’s Notification Center pane if you don’t care for them.
To read or reply to a message: Tap the Messages icon on your Home screen, swipe downward with four fingers to display the Notification Center, or tap the notification if you can be quick about it (it fades away in a few seconds).
Following the conversation: Each conversation you have is saved as a series of text bubbles. Your messages appear on the right side of the screen in blue bubbles; the other person’s messages appear on the left in gray ones.
Forwarding a conversation: If you want to forward all or part of a conversation to another iMessage user, first tap the Action button (the little rectangle with the arrow coming out of it) and then tap the text bubbles you want to forward so that the red check mark appears in a circle to their left.

Then tap the blue Forward button at the lower right of the screen. The contents of the text bubbles with check marks are copied to a new text message; specify a recipient and then tap Send.
Deleting part of a single conversation thread: Tap the Action button at the upper right of the conversation and a circle appears to the left of each text bubble. Tap a text bubble and a red check mark appears in the circle.

When you’ve added a red check mark to all the text bubbles you want to delete, tap the red Delete button at the lower left of the screen. Or, to delete the entire conversation in one fell swoop, tap the Clear All button in the upper-left corner of the screen.
To delete an entire conversation thread: Tap the Edit button at the upper left of the Messages list, tap the red — (minus) icon that appears to the left of the person’s name, and then tap the Delete button that appears to the right of the name.