Unrelatedly, SSH from an iPad sounds like an exquisitely masochistic way to read e-mail.

Please excuse me — I just have to send an SMS from my piano.

It's perfectly all right for reading email. It's true that I wouldn't want to send one that way that's more than a sentence long, but that applies to any use of the iPad keyboard, not SSH in particular.

What do you do? Use the on-screen keyboard to send keystrokes through to your mail client? I assume you've at least chosen a mail client that operates by hitting individual keys, not case-sensitive stuff, chording or the like?

If I were using an iPad to read e-mail, I suspect I'd be setting up an IMAP server pronto!

What do you do? Use the on-screen keyboard to send keystrokes through to your mail client?

Yes. Works perfectly well, even when the keystokes are Ctrl-this or M-that – the iSSH extended keyboard is not excessively unpleasant even for those.