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by Mike Shoemaker.
Original Post: iPhone email, how do you have it configured.
Feed Title: Unruly Rambling (ruby category)
Feed URL: http://www.shoesobjects.com/blog/rss.xml?category=ruby
Feed Description: My thoughts on software, technology, and life in general
The first couple weeks that I had my iPhone, I was using POP3 to retrieve my mail from google. I have my domain setup through Google's hosted service. To make a long story short, this didn't work so well. If you want the details just google and you will find plenty of gripes about gmail and the iphone. The bottom line is that if you have more than one place that you read mail, you need a better solution than POP3.
This is where I embarked on my journey to find a free IMAP provider. With IMAP, I would be able to read my mail on the iphone and when I got home, my Macbook pro would show it marked as read. I basically had two views into the same email system. After doing some searches, I found out that AOL offered free IMAP email accounts. Since AOL is a pretty substantial name, I assumed the service would be decent so I decided to go this route. My setup was as follows. Inside of gmail, I setup the forwarding to forward all mail to this AOL IMAP account. I also set gmail up to archive the mails once they were forwarded. On my iphone, I added the new IMAP provider using the "Other" option when setting up email. The special thing that I did was input the gmail smtp server instead of the IMAP server. Why? Well because I don't want people knowing that I'm using AOL for email. I want them to see all mail come from my domain so I don't end up with more email addresses to maintain. Let me just say this has worked very well. I'm able to deal with each mail once and I didn't have to complicate my friends lives by offering them yet another email address. I have lived with this setup for the last 2 weeks or so.
This weekend I added another tweak. One of the issues I was running into was that all my mailing list mail was showing up on my iPhone. Not exactly the place I wanted it. I prefer to read mailing list email online through a browser. I generally use it for searching anyway. Very seldom to I read every message. I usually browse it like you would browse merchandise at the local mall when you have no intent to buy anything. I came up with a solution to solve this as well without upsetting the current infrastructure(IMAP AOL incoming, SMTP Google outgoing). Instead of doing the global forward inside gmail, I do the following. I turn off global forwarding. I enable all of my filters that tag each mailing list email. I think add a final filter that looks for where the subject of the email does not have the mailing list subject tokens and isn't from mailing list address and forwards this on to the AOL account. One other thing I have gmail do is skip the inbox and archive these messages right away. I also have it tag these messages with a tag called imap so I know they made it over. This means the only thing I have in my inbox is mailing list emails. Everything else that makes it through to the iphone is either good mail or a spam message here and there. Now I have the best of all worlds. I have mailing list email in my browser inbox, personal email goes to both my iPhone and laptop, and best of all I don't have to read and delete mail more than once since I'm using IMAP.
If you have a better way to handle mail, I'm all ears. Obviously, if Google opened up IMAP to the public all this noise would be a non-issue. This would be my preference. Either that or pay for my mail to be hosted. If I run into any further wrinkles, this may be my next option. As for right now, everything is working very well.
NOTE: One odd thing that is happing on my iPhone is that I sometimes see the same message twice. Like it lives in IMAP twice. When I look at AOL's email through the browser or through Apple Mail on my Macbook pro, I only see it once. I'm wondering if this is a product of having a weak connection where the mail downloads but doesn't notify the IMAP server that it actually got the mail. This was happening before this weekend so it has nothing to do with the new filters. Since it's specific to the iPhone only and very easy to fix, I'm not too worried about this. Nevertheless, if someone out there knows why this is happening, please comment.
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