All About Iphone

One of my last hurdles to overcome in fully utilizing my iPhone was setting up e-mail. I have been essentially dreading it as my set up has me getting a lot of mail every day, with a significant portion of it being spam. I have essentially been relying on Thunderbird to deal with SPAM which is not the best solution. After mulling it over for a day or so, I came upon a solution.

I decided I would try to utilize Gmail as a Spam filter for my E-mail. Then I would either pick it up from Gmail or forward it back. My original plan was wanting to forward it back to the same address. This is doable, but I would to muck around with my mail on the server, and my main mail account is actually hosted on a shared server that I do not own, not on one of my own servers. I attempted some half-hearted hacks with Cpanel, but suffice it to say it did not work how I wanted it.

So while still trying to crack the nut of having Gmail sending mail back to the same account that was forwarding to it in the first place, I decided to try the Gmail setup on the iPhone directly. You have to use POP3 with Gmail and the iPhone. This is fine, but the problem for me was that it does not honor the changed “From” field when sending mail. So when I sent mail even though I wanted it to show coming from “me @ mydomain.com” it showed coming from “Mynick @ gmail.com”. This simply was not workable as it made my e-mails potentially confusing to recipients. I really needed a solution that would allow me to send out mail and have the from and reply-to line set to what I wanted, so it would appear to be coming from my original address.

I finally settled on using a second email account. I just set up a second account on my server and had Gmail forward the mail to that account.

So to explain how it works:

Mail comes to my server at “me @ mydomain.com”

My server automatically forwards all mail for “me @ mydomain.com” to “mynick @ gmail.com”

Gmail takes all that mail runs it through their very good spam filtering, and then forwards the remaining messages to “me-secondary @ mydomain.com” and then also archives the messages on Gmail.

I receive the messages at “me-secondary @ mydomain.com” with IMAP both through Thunderbird, and through my iPhone.

So far it has been working excellently. There is no filtering or ability to create new folders on the iPhone, so I have to do all that on Thunderbird, but it has not been a big deal so far. Gmail has been doing an amazing job filtering out the spam, leaving me with a reasonable inflow of mail that can be effectively used on the iPhone. I will ocassionally go to Thunderbird and run my mail filters, but I can access the same mail from both locations now.

The only thing I had to change on the iPhone was what some of my default boxes were. For Trash and Sent boxes, I had to choose the ones I was using on Thunderbird, to sync them up. When people get messages from me it shows as coming from my original address and replies get sent back to the same address.