Chatsquatch

After setting up my email on my iPhone I was initially pretty disappointed with the email functions available. I am an avid Gmail user and had hoped I would simply sign with my iPhone and be mailing away, this was not the case. After many trials and tribulations I have found a way to make my iPhone and Gmail cooperate with each other. I feel I would be in violation of my civil duty if I did not pass this information on to other frustrated iPhone users.

1) Activate you Gmail account on your iPhone.

-this is an easy step and should be no problem.

- The only thing you have to go is make sure you have POP enabled on your Gmail accoun. This is located under the Settings - Forwarding and PoP. You can decide whether or not to keep a copy of mail in the Gmail inbox or not.

2) Turn Recent Mode off.

- Settings > Mail > Your Gmail account name > Advanced, and turn off “Use Recent Mode.”

- By turning off recent mode you will tell Gmail NOT to send a copy of composed mail to all mobile devices including your iPhone. If this option is left on you will receive copies of all mail composed on your iPhone, this can be quite annoying. However, if you are using Gmail on multiple mobile devices you may want to leave this function activated.

3)Check you Gmail from your iPhone.

-This step was very frustrating to me. When I checked my mail for the first time I received 60 messages in my in box which I had already read from my Gmail account. I am unaware of how to prevent this from happening the first time mail is checked. This does only happen once, and in the future only non-read emails will be sent to your iPhone. You might want to do some finger stretches before having to delete all these messages from your inbox one by one. (There is no bulk delete function on the iPhone, as of yet.) Just check you mail and get the first batch over with.

4) Set up a rule/filter in Gmail.

- Another hurdle to overcome using Gmail is for some reason (that Google has yet to explain) when a message is sent from your Gmail account using a PC that message is also sent to your iPhone as a new message. I do not know why this happens, but I did not like this feature. The way I got around this was setting up a filter in Gmail to take anything sent from my address, add a star to it, and place it in the trash can. It does give you a warning every time you send a message from Gmail on a PC but I do not use Gmail as my primary sending email source so it did not bother me to make one more click. To me this was the lesser of to evils. Because a star was added to messages sent from your address you can filter you trash using this feature and not delete sent items.

5) Forward your email:

- I have found it much easier to check one mail account on my iPhone vs managing several. I have all my mail (at least the ones I care about) forwarded to my Gmail and then manage only that account from my phone. This is especially necessary if your main email is a company account that does not have POP capabilities. Forwarding rules are very customizable and easy to right in most applications.

6) Set your deleted mail options.

- Because there is no current way to empty your trash can on the iPhone there is an important setting on the phone that will save you and your finger a lot of work. A setting called “Deleted Messages” in the advanced tap of the email account settings will determine how long deleted messages are stored on your iPhone. I have mine set to remove after one day. Another setting that goes hand in hand with this setting is the “Delete From Server” setting. This determines how long mail on the Gmail server will remain. I have this set to never because I prefer to manage these settings from the PC Gmail client. Especially because all of my sent mail goes to my Gmail trash can.

7) Enjoy!

- Now that I have all my rules in place and my settings correct, emailing on the iPhone is great! With the rumored double tap of the space bar equaling a period keyboard function due in the next update things will be even better! If I could only apply a time period to my forwarding rules in Outlook so I would not get my mail twice while I am at work. If anyone knows how to fix this let me know! Good luck and happy emailing!