iPhone email for GMail users

By now, you've no doubt heard all about the iPhone's push email capabilities via the Yahoo! email service. You may even have given it a spin by now if you're an iPhone owner. However, if you're like me, you were probably somewhat underwhelmed. You also probably noticed that this "push email" didn't seem all that pushy. I'm not certain whether it may have been early hiccups in the system, but email only seemed to get pushed if I was currently in the email app. If I returned to the home screen, emails didn't seem to flow into the phone in a push fashion.

In addition, the iPhone seems to lack any effective means of dealing with large volumes of email and spam. It basically has no ability to manage emails in bulk. And forget about more recent email management innovations such as keyword tagging. So, we're left with having to find a solution to this dilemma by external means.

I also prefer to use an email address on my own domain so that I can freely switch email providers without having to notify all of my contacts of a change in my email address. I forward my emails from this address to my GMail account. I also have GMail configured to use this address on my outbound emails.

My first attempt at a solution was to forward my emails to a Yahoo! account in addition a to my GMail account. However, I quickly realized that any emails I sent from my iPhone using the Yahoo! account not only had my Yahoo! address on them, but they also had Yahoo! advertising at the bottom. Unforgivable. I could find no way around these issues. So, I gave up on using Yahoo! mail altogether.

Fortunately, these issues can be overcome to make the iPhone a truly pleasurable email experience. First, I decided that I would use the POP account that I get with my home ISP (Comcast). This gives me the ability to use my own email address for both inbound and outbound email. I configured a POP account on the iPhone and set it to check for email every 15 minutes (since the so called push email didn't really seem to work anyway, and given the good battery life I seem to be getting, this didn't seem to be a huge loss).

Next, I needed to get email into this account. Rather than forward emails directly from my domain hosting provider, I created a GMail filter that forwards only emails that contain my email address. GMail is now filtering out spam for me and delivering only emails that explicityly reference my email address. I don't get emails from my mailing list subscriptions (unless they happen to cc me), but I find that to be a good thing. Only the emails that are likely to need to be acted upon in a timely manner reach my iPhone, which is exactly what I want.

The only downside to this approach is that emails aren't marked as having been read in GMail when viewed on the iPhone, but I find that to be a relatively minor annoyance. On the balance, this is a very workable solution. Happy emailing on your iPhone!