Saturday, June 30, 2007

iPhone: Gmail for your domain

Update: (From Napoleon via comment)
I believe this is the answer to your problem: Google Hosted Email Answer

Change your account login information to: recent:username@domain.com
Making the change on my iPhone seems to do the trick. Thanks Napoleon.


I've run in to my first real issue with the iPhone: weak support for Gmail for your domain.

First of all, the initial sync doesn't work correctly. By default the iPhone postfixes all 'Gmail' accounts with @gmail.com. I'm not sure what qualifies an account as a 'Gmail' account (on the iPhone), but I'll guess that the pop and smtp google servers might be the key.

So, following the initial sync, the iPhone tried to access my email with username@domain.com@gmail.com. Not good, but not the end of the world. I was able to get around this by creating a new pop account on the iPhone and putting in the correct server and user information. Now my iPhone can receive my email, but here's the catch: it only picks up email if it's the first to find it.

What I mean by 'first to find it' is that if the iPhone finds a new message, it grabs it, but then Apple Mail never gets the message. Or, if Apple Mail grabs a new message, I never get the new message on my iPhone.*

According to Russell Whitman:
[T]his happens because google only allows one pop pull down...
Great.

I considered forwarding all mail to phone@mydomain.com and simply checking that email, but then if I ever reply it will come from phone@mydomain.com. Then, any replies to my reply will never make it back to Apple Mail. Same problem, once again.

I'm not sure how many people have Gmail for your domain, so I'm not very optimistic that this is going to be resolved soon.

* Yes, I do have the settings set to never delete messages on the server. In fact, if I log into the web interface, the message is still unread as far as Gmail is concerned.

14 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:09 PM

    I've been struggling with the same issue all day. Please update the post if you stumble across a fix.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous12:28 AM

    I'm running into the exact same kind of problem (even worse in fact as it is getting all unread messages started from one year ago, which is not helpful at all). Plus pop is really not suited for reading emails in more than one location.

    I'm currently looking into an imap bridge to see if I can get around this.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous1:03 AM

    could you set username@mydomain.com to be the spoofed default 'from' address in the phone@mydomain.com account?
    _pappy

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous1:34 AM

    I believe this is the answer to your problem: Google Hosted Email Answer

    Change your account login information to:

    recent:username@domain.com

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous4:27 AM

    Thanks, Napoleon, that's worth a try.

    However, pop remains an inferior solution.
    It looks like the imap bridge I've been looking at, with a few tweaks, will work (well, it works fine with apple mail, including synchronizing read states, labels and stars :) ) so I'm quite hopeful once I have this on a server, it will work with the iPhone.
    More tomorrow. It is getting late here.

    ReplyDelete
  6. How about having to delete each e-mail one ... at ... a ... time? Belong to any listservs? That's what I thought.

    Ouch time.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous9:38 AM

    Yeah, that's kind of a bummer. But, I just check all my personal mail on my iPhone and check all my list email in Apple Mail.

    But, I agree, I'd like to see a feature added.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I'm not sure about Gmail for your domain, but in normal gmail, when you use the SMTP server, gmail automagically overrides the From and Reply-to headers to whatever the default account is.

    So, if it's the same and you still wanted to go with the redirection method, you could login as phone@domain.com and set the default account to be something else.

    Worth a try anyways.

    ReplyDelete
  9. since the gmail web client is better than Apple Mail, why don't you just use that?

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous5:25 PM

    Most of my mail use is when I can't be connected to the Internet. ( in airplanes )

    Cheers, Jay

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anonymous1:33 PM

    I've figured it out - check this out.

    http://www.stream-tech.com/gmail_iphone.html

    ReplyDelete
  12. Ok this works great...EXCEPT that emails sent from my iphone using the google hosted account appear in my inbox on my iphone. I cant seem to find a workaround. I did create a filter and label (as suggested elsewhere), so that any email from myself is filtered to bypass the inbox and labeled, but this did not seem to do the trick. Anyone else having this problem and/or have any solutions.

    ReplyDelete
  13. As far as your issue about multiple downloads on your POP accoumt, I assume this is easy to fix. Just set one of the clients to not erase the mail from the server after recieving it. At least that used to be the problem with normal POP3 accounts. I'm just not quite sure about Gmail since I've only needed one POP3 if any.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Try this on your iPhone Settings>Mail>your_GMail_account>Advanced and set “Use Recent Mode” to off.

    If you now discover that your iPhone ignores your "from address" GMail, then go find this at slapphappe.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/working-around-iphone-issues-with-gmail/

    ReplyDelete

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