Make iPhone, Apple Mail, and GMail POP work together

Mar 25, '08 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I was really sick of POP GMail and the iPhone not just working. I found several types of hints online, and none would really work for my situation. I use POP on GMail so that I can get mail on my Mac and leave a copy on GMail's server for archive and search purposes, which I do endlessly. The subtle implication here is that I have about 2,500 messsages in there.

So I set up the iPhone and was all excited when it just took my accounts from iTunes and set them up. But I noticed one thing: even if I had Recent on, for some reason, my Mac and my iPhone would race to download a message and if one got it, sometimes the other did, and sometimes it didn't. I confirmed this to happen to other people via many furious and frazzled searches waaaay past my bedtime.

Another thing I found was that I'm not a super great typer on the iPhone yet, and there were some messages I'd want to read on the iPhone but respond to on my Mac. In short, for a lot of reasons, it wouldn't bother me to have messages on my GMail, on my Mac via Mail, and on my iPhone.

Further, even if I got some messages to actually find their way to the iPhone, I could read them okay, but when I deleted them, the iPhone politely asked me if I would like to load the next two billion -- I'm not exaggerating, it really said that -- messages. I found this to be a documented problem and, frankly, I was disgusted. Well, I figured out away for everyone to just get along:

  1. Set up a new account on GMail. For this, I just added a "1" to the end of my existing GMmail account. Make sure you have POP enabled.
  2. Make your current GMail forward to that address.
  3. Add a new account on the iPhone, but click Other instead of GMail when setting it up. Now enter in your new GMail account info, but on the outgoing server, put in smtp.gmail.com with your old GMail account.
This way, you will receive an email any time one pops into your GMail account on your iPhone and on your Mac (provided you already had your Mac setup how you wanted it). Also, when you respond to an email, it will appear to come from your regular GMail account since you used that outgoing server. Now everyone can play happily together!

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