iPhone email, how do you have it configured.

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:49:46 GMT

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.

Talk to me

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 12:21:46 GMT

Well I configured my Google Talk account today. I have no buddies yet, but I hope to get some soon :)

Ping me if you have one: mshoemaker AT gmail DOT com

Poor Man's Spam Filtering Solution

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 06:22:30 GMT

As I stated 107 days ago, the amount of Spam that I receive is increasing each month. I am using SpamSieve on the client side but this approach still requires me to download the spam and allow Apple's Mail Program to throw it away. While this does save me time, a better approach would be to catch it further up stream. There are modules that I could plug into my mail server to do so but I've found a fairly effective approach that requires little work on my end and zero maintenance.

Steps to drastically reduce spam

Configure my mail server to forward all of my mail to my gmail account
Configure Apple mail to grab my mail from gmail via pop3
Leave my mail server as the default smtp server for this account so people don't get confused on which address I'm using.

With this solution, gmail becomes my spam filtering software by moving spam to a special folder that doesn't get retrieved via pop3 access. Not to mention it does one heck of job filtering. This solution also has the added benefit of me being able to view my mail online until I pop it down from gmail. Another plus is that no mail gets lost, I can always look in gmail's spam folder to make sure something didn't get marked as spam incorrectly.

UPDATE: It has now been about two days and I've already concluded that this is a great solution. So far Gmail has caught just under 300 spam messages with zero false positives and SpamSieve has only had to catch 6 locally. Thanks Google for filtering my spam!

Gmail Invites to give away.

Sat, 21 Aug 2004 19:39:10 GMT

Although I really don't know what the big fuss is, I have 4 gmail invites to the first four comments to this blog entry. Please leave your email address.

Unruly Rambling - gmail tag

iPhone email, how do you have it configured.

Talk to me

Poor Man's Spam Filtering Solution

Gmail Invites to give away.