Help with MobileMe and iPhone

[leglez]

I just signed up for the trial of MobileMe tonight and have a few questions. I am not sure if I understand what its used for or not. I thought that it would sync all my mail accounts with my iphone. I set it up on my iphone and on my computer, but it doesn't seem to pull any emails from any accounts other than the .me account. I have tried a couple different things in the me.com website and nothing seems to work. I have 3 Gmail accounts in my Mail app, I also setup the me.com account in Mail. I am wanting to sync all 3 Gmail accounts with my iPhone. Contacts and calendars and all the is nice too, but mostly worried about the email accounts.

 

[aphex]

Thats not exactly how Mobile Me works unfortunately. Mobile Me is a separate e-mail address, so as far as the iPhone and Mail.app are concerned, they are all separate accounts (they will only sync with the accounts you tell it to). You can add the separate gmail addresses as accounts on the iPhone, but then you end up with separate inboxes (which is kinda annoying IMO)

In order to accomplish what I think your looking to do (have 3 gmail accounts flow into a single address with Push Capability for the iPhone), your best bet is to log into Gmail and have each account forward a copy of each message to your Me.com address. Then as each message gets received by Gmail, it will automatically forward to your Me.com address and subsequently be pushed out to your phone.

 

[alevasseur14]

The only thing account MobileMe will keep synced and send push updates for is the me account. When I signed up for the service when the 3G came out, I didn't want to give up my Gmail address. I got around that problem by forwarding all emails from my Gmail account to my MobileMe account. To make sure it looked like email was still coming from my Gmail accounts, I simply set up the MobileMe account on my phone to use the Gmail SMTP server. It works great and nobody knows the emails are being forwarded but me.

Hope that can help you!

Edit: Bah! Aphex beat me to it! However, the info about changing your outgoing SMTP server still applies. Good luck!

 

[leglez]

Hmm, well couldn't I just setup the gmail accounts on the phone and not need mobileme at all? I don't really need mobileme for anything but emails.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: leglez
Hmm, well couldn't I just setup the gmail accounts on the phone and not need mobileme at all? I don't really need mobileme for anything but emails.

Yes and no. The phone only supports one Gmail account iirc.

Mobileme would be useful to have all of your mail forwarded there for near-isntant retrieval, but that's it.

 

[alevasseur14]

You could do that for sure. These things may or may not be a big deal to you but you won't receive push email from MobileMe. You'll have to set the phone to check every so often. In addition to that, you won't be able to sync your contacts and other things between your phone and computers.

These may or may not be deal breakers for you, but I really love the instant push emails and contact syncing. I think the contact syncing alone makes MobileMe totally worth it.

 

[aphex]

Originally posted by: Goosemaster

Originally posted by: leglez
Hmm, well couldn't I just setup the gmail accounts on the phone and not need mobileme at all? I don't really need mobileme for anything but emails.

Yes and no. The phone only supports one Gmail account iirc.

Mobileme would be useful to have all of your mail forwarded there for near-isntant retrieval, but that's it.

It would also allow a global inbox in a way, as unless things changed, the iPhone will separate each account into a separate inbox, forwarding them all to Mobile Me would allow a single inbox with all the mail.