80 Comments »

What are you using for the private IMAP?
I am having trouble getting the smtp server on the private IMAP account to send email from my gmail account.
I can set the outgoing server as smtp.gmail.com, but then I lose the ability to view sent messages on my iPhone.

Hey Seth,

I’m just using an extra IMAP account that I get from my hosting ISP.

It should be sending from private IMAP straight out to the interwebtubes. How it gets to gmail is by setting your iPhone to automatically CC yourself. It will CC your public facing address and these CCed emails basically circle back and are received by gmail.

Also as I mentioned, you’ll need to filter out emails that come from yourself or these CCs will come to your iPhone inbox.

Got it. My IMAP is giving me errors because I’m trying to send “from” the front-facing address using the private IMAP smtp server.
I guess this just varies from ISP to ISP.

I did a similar setup for my mail… but I wanted to make a suggestion…

Instead of CC yourself, you can do as you suggest in #10 and set your public email as the sending email in gmail. Then when you setup your mail on your iPhone, just make the outgoing smtp.gmail.com and send your mail with gmail. This way, you will actually be sending from gmail, you won’t have to CC everything, and it will appear to your recipient as your public email account.

Nice tutorial by the way… I’m finally happy with my email, gmail and iPhone :)

Thanks Jared,

You’re correct. You can just have gmail as the outgoing SMTP server. I had set it up to use the IMAP so that the sent messages would be in my IMAP for when I check it in Apple Mail.

However, I actually find myself using the iPhone more and more and my Apple Mail less and less, so really there is no need store the sent on the IMAP. I might just switch over to using Gmail as my SMTP.

Seth,

I guess it does vary. In any case, you could just use gmail as the SMTP as Jared suggests.

Finally, a solution that works! I was having trouble with my gmail alone…getting 25 old messages downloaded and not being able to clear the inbox. It just would retrieve more and more old messages. The IMAP intermediate works great and I get gmail filtering.

thanks for the setup tutorial. I needed it. Works like a charm!

Excellent work-around! Nicely explained.

However, I use Gmail’s tagging feature extensively. I suppose this can only be done via a web browser. I usually tag an item before archiving it, then I go back and pull out action items based on the tags. I will also star an email that I need to act on right away, and leave it in the inbox as a reminder.

As a concept, I think email really needs to be integrated with a To-Do kind of function that let’s us categorize and prioritize items. Gmail is as close as I’ve found in a Web-based environment.

I’m ready to buy an iPhone, when I can fully use Gmail, gCalendar, and contacts on it. I think the Plaxo products may be my answer, but not sure.

Thanks for all the effort you put in to this tutorial. It’s very helpful.

- John

Yeah I was also using gmail in this way too, but I found that it quickly grew out of control. When your email box is also your to do list it makes you dread visiting it when stuff piles up.

Also all the labeling and archiving just took too long. This is my same problem with some aspects of the GTD approach: all that adding context and projects and whatnot just takes too long. It’s often better to just write down the things you may forget and then tackle whatever’s in front of you.

This is what I like most about using the iPhone email. I just read, reply, delete. It’s quick and painless. It highly contrasts with my work setup where I have to use the slow and painful Outlook 2003 — I can’t stand Outlook. Plus I only get 45MB of online email storage — what’s up with that?

Relatedly I was asked by a colleague, how I get it to work with the exchange servers. I said, “I don’t which is fine because i’m almost always near my laptop at work and frankly I don’t want work emails on my phone.”

[...] catcubed παρουσιάζει ένα ‘τέλειο’ τρόπο να χειρίζεστε τα email σας στο iPhone. Gmail, forwarding, IMAP, syncing. Πλήρες integration σε Mail, iPhone, και web-based [...]

Any thoughts on how to make this work with .Mac mail, if that’s all the IMAP you got?

Hey Stretch, I don’t have a .Mac account to test it on, but from reading the .mac configuration page you should be able to just manually set up using the following settings…
incoming server: mail.mac.com
login: (your name before the @)
password: (your .mac password)

And then outgoing is your gmail SMTP

Colin,
do you have a similar set-up for people who don’t have IMAP accounts? my hosting company (xo.com) does not provide IMAP accounts… or maybe you know where one can be had. thanks.
B

Just found out the AOL offers free IMAP email accounts which can work with a personal domain. I hope the SPAM filter is as good as gmail. The size limit is unlimited.

https://domains.aol.com/personaldomain/app/domainMainSearch
Just click on the bring your own domain.

Plan to try this out with the iPhone. Any one tried this or have experience of AOL email?

Colin,

Excellent tutorial. I’m not the sharpest nail in the toolbox, but even I got it to work. Everything functions as advertised except for the automagically syncing sent folder on the Mac and the iPhone. I never did get that added bonus.

Regardless, great work!

Oliver,
While I didn’t look to much into the AOL email you linked to. I’d guess that you should be able to use the AOL IMAP email with my setup so that you are using gmail’s spam filtering.

Brock,
Did you make sure to add the correct IMAP Path Prefix? I’m not sure about your server, but I had to add “INBOX” for this setting in both my Apple Mail and iPhone to get it to sync.

Bogdan,
You might want to check out the free AOL email accounts that Oliver pointed out.

So all the email on your iphone/imail show as forwards “Fw: …” isn’t that annoying?

Matt,
No gmail filter forwarding happens before all that and there is no “FW:” or other sign that it has been forwarded. On the frontend it’s completely transparent that any of this kung fu filtering is happening.

[...] CatCubed: Gmail, IMAP, and iPhones - Part 2 - The Tutorial - “As I posted previously, I’ve been experimenting with finding a my perfect iPhone email set up.” Neato-sounding (if kind of complicated) setup for iPhone-friendlier email. [...]

Colin,

You are absolutely right and hit the nail on the head. In my excitement I forgot to do just that. Thank you - my email setup is now perfect.

Colin,

Thanks for the great tip…however I’m having problems since it doesn’t seem to be forwarding the mail to the IMAP account–in this case my .Mac account.

I’m using my spam-filled sbcglobal addy as my main and that’s being forwarded to gmail and that seems to be working. The gmail filter was applied properly (I think), but I don’t see anything coming into my .Mac email.

Here’s what my gmail filter looks like:
Matches: from:(xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@sbcglobal.​net)
Do this: Forward to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@mac.com, Skip Inbox, Apply label “iPhone”

BTW, can you do more than one email in this filter? Separated by commas perhaps?

Regarding my sbcglobal account…I have a main account with two sub accounts–one of which is my main account (hence my previous question). Would that be screwing it up? When I check my email through a web client, the mail keeps coming and I don’t see it hitting gmail. Am I screwing things up by checking the sbc account with the web client–could it be preventing it from being forwarded?

Sorry for all of the questions, but AT&T’s pitiful spam filters give me a daily job that I don’t want–ESPECIALLY on my iPhone. Thanks for listening.

Hey Bob,
Technically, the mail forwarded from your sbcglobal.​net addy is not coming “from” it (automated forwards are different). So you need remove it out of the “from” field. It should then work.

Also If you want, you can add your sbcglobal.​net addy (and your gmail addy) to the “to” field. This will make sure mail addressed to you is forwarded, but mail were you are just BCCed (like some spam and mailing lists) is not forwarded.

Thank you SO much. This is the holy grail i’ve been wanting for EVER. Server side spam filtering sucks on the mail server I use so using IMAP on a mobile device was far from practical due to the amount of spam I get. This setup solves all of my problems. If there was a donate link, i’d hit it =]

Okay, thanks for that clarification. Added the sbc addy to the “to” field, but it still doesn’t seem to be forwarding on to the .Mac account.

Another question is on the iPhone settings…I set up a test account and used my sbc addy in the “address” field. Here’s the settings…
Incoming:
Host name: mail.mac.com
User name: xxxxxxx
Password: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Outgoing (SMTP):
Host name: smtp.gmail.com:465
User name: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com
Password: xxxxxxxxx

Advanced:
Incoming uses SSL: ON
Outgoing uses SSL: ON
Authentication: Password
IMAP path prefix: INBOX.
Is this correct?

According to the Apple pages on .Mac mail, the incoming ports will switch between secure and non-secured ports. I’m wondering if turning off SSL on the iPhone would fix this issue? Here’s part of that .Mac help page:

“The Incoming mail (IMAP) port number automatically changes from 143 to 993, but you will need to manually change the Outgoing server (SMTP) from 25 to 587. If you are configuring the account as POP, the Incoming mail port instead changes from 110 to 995.”

Still scratching my head on this one…

Thanks loren,
Glad it’s working out for you! And I guess I can’t pass up a request like that, so I’ve now added a PayPal Tip Jar in the right sidebar under my photo area.

Aha, works very nicely, thank you again! gmail on the iphone doesn’t suck anymore :)

Thanks Matt!

So one issue I’m seeing after setting this up – how do you search the archived emails that you’ve deleted from your IMAP account? Sure, they’re archived in gmail, but I can’t search for sent or old mail messages from within mail.app? Any advice on this?

Jimbo,
Your sent mail should be being synced already. When your deleting the mail off the iPhone the IMAP syncs the deletes with your Apple Mail.

Personally this is the system I want as I like gmail’s search functionality. If you’d rather keep the messages locally, you can set up filters in Apple Mail that moves it from your inbox to other folders (either local-only or folders that sync on your server). These filters will only be triggered when you open Apple Mail so you’d just read and NOT delete on the iPhone (maybe move it another folder manually) and let the Apple Mail take care of it later. This moves will be synced to your iPhone: if you moved to a local-only it’ll be treated like it was deleted; if it’s a synced folder it’ll show up in that folder on your iPhone.

Otherwise, if what you want is a system that you can actualy delete from your iPhone but not sync these deletes, then what you really want is a POP account not an IMAP.

I was able to follow your instructions but only with partial success: when I delete emails on iphone, they remain on my IMAP server. Any ideas why?

I’ve ran into the same issue, GMail doesn’t forward to .Mac account, so I don’t think that can be used for IMAP account.

Actually my guess is .Mac throws away email that is forwarded to it. I can send directly to my .mac account and I get it fine.

Marcus,
Have you tested the filter forwarding to a different account just to make sure that it is actually forwarding properly? Have you checked any .Mac spam filters?

Has anyone else got this working with a .Mac account? I thought I read that someone had it working with .Mac — unfortunately, I don’t have a .Mac account so I can’t test it myself.

K all,
I did some testing using a trial .Mac account and I’ve had some trouble myself. Not sure if it’s a fault of mine or .Mac, but I’m not seeing the emails. But it’s late and my brain is tired so I could have missed some step.

This forum seems to have people that have gotten it to work. I’ll troubleshoot it a bit more later. Also, if anyone else has a more definitive answer to the .Mac question let me know.

Colin, I think that link is incorrect. ;-)

Thanks, for the heads up Bob! Link in my comment above now works!

Hey… great work.
One thing I notice… when I send email from the imap using gmail as the outbound and after setting up my “facing” email in gmail to send out…

When people with exchange server get an email from my … that went from my imap via gmail that I want to look like it came from my facing email…
It shows that it was $$$$$$@gmail.com on behalf of facingemail@whatever.com

so basicly people see my gmail account and on my of my friends work computer my email sent this way gets spam filtered out.

Anyone else have this issue?

thanks.
T

This seems brilliant but when Gmail forwards my mail the reply-to is set as my gmail (forwarding) account instead of the actual sender. The From box shows the actual sender but the Reply-to naturally overrides it. I am using .Mac/Mail as my IMAP account. I have checked Gmail and nowhere is it set (that I can see) to force a Reply-to address. Any ideas?

Huh, you’re right Terry.
Exchange does display that rather odd message. I had tested it earlier with Exchange when I was using my old system (out through IMAP and BCCed back to myself) and that didn’t happen. So I didn’t think to test it again.

It still replies to your header email fortunately, but it’s annoying. If you want to avoid this you can possibly set it up the way I used to do it:
- Set your outgoing as your IMAP Or better your public facing
- Select the iphone option to BCC yourself on all outgoing emails. This way it routes back to your gmail (it’ll still thread with the conversations like normal).
- You’ll need to gmail filter out any messages that come from yourself so that they don’t get sent back to your iphone

Unfortunately, some ISPs don’t allow you to use a different header for outgoing emails, so this my not work for you. It worked on my Bluehost account though.

To Cary and all others having trouble with using .Mac,

.Mac seems to be a problem. It doesn’t work at all for some people and for others it works halfway. I haven’t had time to fully test it myself.

As I wrote in my lLatest Post, I will be away from CatCubed for the next couple weeks as I pack and head to Burning Man. After I return, I will do my best to find time to tackle these issues. Also I’m planning on writing a bit more detailed instructions for people less apt at geekdom than I.

Thanks Colin.
I have Blluehost as well.
But I was using a different imap account.
I will try it with my bluehost.
My only point I guess.. would be the possibility of people finding out my gmail account. (an account which I treasure)

Thanks again for your work on this.

T

I’ve recently revised the tutorial to reflect issues that were brought up in the comments.

Thanks for the help and heads up Colin.

I have just forced myself into the realization that .Mac is sluggish and will not work using your technique. I have it set up with a test account on my iPhone, but now it won’t even display the email body for some bizarre reason–but it sends from Gmail just fine (go figure).

I started playing with Yahoo mail as a possible IMAP replacement, but as that works well with forwarded mail, I can’t set it up manually for your method since the iPhone’s screens won’t allow it when setting up Yahoo accounts (this is how Yahoo will give iPhone customers free push IMAP by ID’ing them this way).

Since I’ve created a new Yahoo account for this test, I think I’ll just enjoy Gmail’s spam filtering and forward it to the Yahoo account or play with it some more…I’ve been playing with all of these accounts for so long now that it’s making my head spin.

Thanks again and enjoy Burning Man.

Hi Cat, I’m not sure if u know about Google Apps [ http://www.google.com/a ]. It offers to host your domain’s emails in real. You don’t need to set FROM: and REPLY-TO: addresses in a standard Gmail account to send & receive your own domain’s email.

Point ur domain’s MX record to Google and create a free standard account on Google Apps and u can have unlimited email addresses on ur domain each with 2GB and growing storage space.

In case u think 2GB is not enough, u can always upgrade to a $50/yr/email account Premium service with 10GB storage!

Well um “Google Packistan”, if that’s your real name

Google Apps is great and all but they only offer POP access, so if I were to redirect my catcubed.com MX record I’d no longer have IMAP; thus couldn’t use my system.

Cat,

Your tutorial is wonderful, thanks. I set up GMAIL to filter all my listserv messages with Skip the Input, Apply the Label, so these do not come to my iPhone.

The filter is working, but these messages are still being downloaded to my iPhone from G-mail. Did I miss a step somewhere?

I haven’t implemented forwarding the G-mail back to DOT MAC yet, still just POP’ing from G-mail.

Dave

GMail, IMap and iPhones

Are you having problems trying to get GMail and iPhone to play nicely? Colin has written up a great article detailing a solution that might work for you quite well. It isn’t as hard as it looks, just make sure to read carefully
Basically entail…

For those of you who are trying to use your .Mac account, I figured out an easy way to make it work. On your iPhone, get rid of the existing .Mac email account setup. Then add a new account, and choose the other option. You then set up the new account with your public email, you use your .Mac info as your incoming mail server and your gmail account as your outgoing server. It works perfectly.

Also, I was having trouble creating really long filters in gmail. Once I got too many email domains within the brackets, I kept getting errors whenever I tried to save the filter. I switched over to basic HTML for gmail, and the errors disappeared.

Bram Posted:

The only problem with manually configuring .Mac email on your iPhone is that you can no longer upload a photo taken with your iPhone to your .Mac web gallery. Took me a day to figure that out. Which sucks.

I have followed the steps above to forward my email from two gmail accounts to my .Mac email account. One of my gmail accounts is my unique personal email tied to my personal domain name. I’ve also had a Yahoo email forever and an AOL AIM email too.

On the iPhone I’m able to manually configure my AIM email account to send out as my personal domain email. I have configured both my Yahoo and .Mac email accounts normally to get PUSH email from Yahoo and photo upload to .Mac.

I’m also forwarding my .Mac email to my Yahoo account to get the PUSH feature for all my mail. I have iPhone set to Auto Check manually.

So when I get email to any of my accounts I get an indication immediately with Yahoo. I delete the forwarded email that came from my .Mac and then know to manually check that account on the phone.

A pain in the butt but I couldn’t figure out any other way to get PUSH.

I manage three email accounts from my gmail. With this setup, is it possible to reply using the address that the message comes in on? For example, if i get an email @school.edu that comes through to Apple Mail or the iPhone via IMAP, will my response always be from @gmail.com?

Thanks for this great work!

your email will be sent using whatever main address set up originally. If you want to send with a different account you’d need to add a separate account profile on you’re iPhone.

hey guys,- thanks for everyone that put their effort/opinion on this! I am a VERY new iPhone user and am having trouble understanding some of the lingo, but after searching the internet for hours, what I’ve understood here is as close as i’m going to get! What im trying to do is this:
My gmail account is my main account but i want my mail pushed from yahoo! to my iphone. I’ve set up a yahoo! account just for this purpose, which I hope i can just keep a secret and use it as IMAP push. With that being said I want all mail sent from my iphone to be from my gmail account, or have it display the name. I believe this is exactly what you guys are talking about here but I’m getting lost in all the gmail/yahoo! settings!?! My iphone now has two accounts open (yahoo and gmail) and im getting the same mail messages sent to both! Im confused and Im sorry but is there another step-by-step instructional anywhere? This has been VERY helpful and I am impressed with the effort put in, as I have said; i’m just a slow and very detailed kind of learner :( Any help would be appreciated! Thank you!

holy shit.

all my public facing accounts are hosted through gmail apps. do you have any idea how frustrated i was facing thousands of emails that needed to be deleted anytime i felt like restoring my iphone?

beer is on me — shortly.

thanks, stud.

Colin,

Thank you so much. I was a bit confused, but muddled through and everything works amazingly, ridiculously well. You should be given a medal or something. Thanks again.

After a long, muddling process, I adopted both your workaround (brilliant) and Jared’s idea of using the public email as the sending email in gmail/making gmail the SMTP.

At that point, I was lost as to why this was such a smart workaround — Gmail had suddenly been turned into a big dumb box of archives. But then I reopened Mail.app, which I hadn’t used in years, and realized the glory of this system. Fast, sleek, interconnected access to my email in three spots (home, work, on the road), and a searchable archive from anywhere (including on my iPhone).

Nice work. All respect due.

[...] I read it on the iPhone I want it to reflect that in Mail.app and vice versa– I had to do a slightly complicated set up. Also, to keep the curved line of the phone, the jack is slightly recessed making it difficult for [...]

I am finding that my sent mail is not showing up on my iphone. It is in google and all that seems to be working fine, but sent mail is empty on my iphone even though I’ve sent a couple of test messages to my work account.

Ideas?

I’m having some trouble setting up the manual filter correctly in gmail. Mail is forwarding to the private IMAP account correctly but the BCC’s are showing up in the gmail inbox. Any more detail on the filter set-up would be much appreciated!

[...] CatCubed: Gmail, IMAP, and iPhones - Part 2 - The Tutorial - “As I posted previously, I’ve been experimenting with finding a my perfect iPhone email set up.” Neato-sounding (if kind of complicated) setup for iPhone-friendlier email. [...]

so i haven’t found the ‘auto synchronize changed mailboxes’ setting you mentioned.. u mind giving me some direction? thanks, -Trent

I setup an aol account and managed to get email coming in, but when I setup my iphone to send through smtp.gmail.com:465 it keeps failing. I tried to also send it via :587, still a no go. Anyone have any thoughts on what I am doing incorrectly?

I still think this is a brilliant system, but so far my setup has one flaw: when I’m part of a long BCC list, the message is delivered to Gmail, but won’t then forward on to the iPhone account. I’m sure it’s that I haven’t done the filter correctly in Gmail. Anyone know how to make BCC and CC part of the “to” filter?

Slight tweak to my question. With the following two filters set up, emails directly TO me and CC’ed to me are forwarded on to my iPhone as desired:

from: {-myvanity@vanity.com -mygmail@gmail.com}
to: {myvanity@vanity.com mygmail@gmail.com}

and

from: {-myvanity@vanity.com -mygmail@gmail.com}
Has the Words: {bcc: myvanity@vanity.com bcc:mygmail@gmail.com cc: myvanity@vanity.com cc:mygmail@gmail.com}

BUT those emails on which I’m BCC’ed do NOT show up. Note how odd it is that the CC works, even though it comes SECOND in the Has the Words string.

Whoo. I’m out of my depth.

Thanks for the excellent tutorial. This setup is working out great, so far. I do have one small issue though. The time stamp on my incoming email on my iPhone doesn’t match the archived email in my Gmail archive. The email has the correct time stamp when it arrives in Gmail, but when it arrives on my iPhone the time is 6 hours later… Anyone have any idea where to fix this?

Late to the party here, but thank you! It works wonderfully. Again, many thanks!

ping imap.gmail.com

Again, late to the party - but works great too… almost!

Anyone have any idea why I can send e-mail fine logged into GMail, but when I try and send it via my iPhone I receive a bounce back message saying “relaying denied”.

It’s also worth mentioning my setup involves the GMail account, the IMAP account and an Exchange Server from which messages are forwarded and messages are being sent on to (the recipients are all on the same Exchange Server).

Cheers!

Now that Gmail supports imap, which I was understandably excited about, I’m suddenly a little skittish about backing out of your system and going full-time with Gmail and my vanity domain. Anyone attempted it? Any pitfalls to be aware of?

Answered my own question. It works, technically speaking, but when I reply from my iPhone, it sends from my gmail.com account, which defeats the whole purpose of putting my vanity domain through gmail. In short, your system, while tougher to implement, is way more effective, in the end. Thanks again for doing what Google cannot. Someone out there owes you big money.

G-Mail now do IMAP !

Jake -
I had the same concern about the public facing address on mail sent from the iPhone… but it’s actually addressed in the tutorial. If you set up your outgoing smtp on the iPhone from the address you to be public facing, that’s what will show. I set mine up that way, and it works.

Great tutorial….
thanks,

Okay, I’m a little late to the game, but I just got an iPhone and am trying to figure all this out. My problem is that I have TWO public-facing emails. One business and one personal. AND now that Gmail does IMAP I feel like it’s all up in the air for me. What do I do?

ANSWER - Put an asterisk (*) in the “to” box when setting up your Gmail filter. It will forward ALL email, including those that you are BCC’ed and CC’ed on. I was having this trouble for the longest time, and now I get all of my email, including things that I’m CCe’d or BCC’ed on :)

[...] (voor mij althans) Ik heb onderstaande (link) tutorial gevolgd, en het werkt als een trein. CatCubed Gmail, IMAP, and iPhones - Part 2 - The Tutorial Een slimme en zeer effectieve oplossing! Groetjes, [...]

I’m wondering if you’ve gone for the iPhone 2.0 software, and whether it streamlines your system at all. I’m not touching my settings until I hear from smarter folks than myself, and yours was the smartest workaround I’d ever heard of last time.

we should talk more about this. I think I have a pretty nice system going atm. What do you use for synced to do lists?

i recreated my gmail account on my iphone and macbook as imap and it all syncs itself quite beautifully, minimum fuss and i have access to all my emails whether i’m on the phone or laptop connected to the web or not (laptop only mail.app)

Hi and thank you to everyone, particularly Colin who started this. I’ve really tried to follow the story but to me, as a newbie and an old one at that, I’m overwhelmed with information.

I have an iPhone 3G and would like to reduce spam. I see that using Gmail will help.

I have a main email account which is a POP3 or is it IMAP (****@*********.freeserve.co.uk)
I also have a Gmail account, which is on my pC and on my iPhone 3G.

Could someone simply list the settings that each device should have?

Thank you in advance.

Mike

Your comment

Name (required)

E-Mail (Required, not published )

Website

HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>