Making GMail Suck Less on Your iPhone

Update: IMAP is now available on GMail. These instructions are no longer relevant.

Here’s what you do:

  • Go signup for a Yahoo mail account.
  • Setup filters in your GMail account to forward mail to your Yahoo account
  • Create a new IMAP email account on your iPhone with the following settings:
    • EMail address: your gmail email address
    • Incoming server: imap.apple.mail.yahoo.com
    • Incoming user/pass: your yahoo username and password
    • Outgoing server: smtp.gmail.com
    • Outgoing user/pass: your gmail username and password


Here’s the idea. By forwarding to Yahoo mail with a filter, you’re able to weed out sent messages as well as any mailing lists or other email you don’t want going to your phone. Hint: you can negate items with a minus sign (From: -”my_mailing_list”). By using your gmail server as your SMTP server, your outgoing mail will still go through gmail, which means it will be from the proper address as well as being stored in your sent mail folder on you gmail account. Enjoy.

6 thoughts on “Making GMail Suck Less on Your iPhone

  1. Hey, not only did i read your blog, but i found it helpful! Amazing how that works sometimes! Keep it up bro!

  2. ktula:
    I haven’t. Though, I doubt it would work as most push IMAP services require special software to be installed on the server equipment of the cell network.

  3. I kind of got Yahoo! push mail to work. I realized that once i got YouTube on iPhone working, i could set up Yahoo! mail using the default settings. Yahoo! Push mail does not seem to work consistently. Sometimes i get a new email immediately, sometimes i don’t.

  4. Hey Dave, i can’t seem to get your tip to work. This is what i did:
    Settings –> Mail –> Add Account… –> Other

    Incoming Mail Server
    Host Name: imap.apple.mail.yahoo.com
    User Name: email address user name (minus @yahoo.com)
    Password: p/w for yahoo

    Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)
    Host Name: smtp.gmail.com
    User Name: email address user name (minus @gmail.com)
    Password: p/w for gmail

    When i click on “Save”, it says “Verifying IMAP account information”. After a while, i get this error prompt: “Cannot Connect Using SSL – Do you want to try setting up the account without SSL – Yes/No”

    So what is your SSL settings (under Advanced) ?

    Thanks!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>