I think a large portion of the American—and possibly worldwide—population is bitterly lamenting the lack of Gmail’s push capabilities with the iPhone. Gmail was quirky with the BlackBerry too, but in different ways. With the BlackBerry, if I set Gmail up with POP instead of IMAP, the Berry got messages before they showed up on my computer. IMAP…took a while. The iPhone is the same with IMAP. I have the iPhone set to poll hourly for Gmail, but there are other forces at work, because my Gmail arrives on the iPhone anywhere from before it lands in my inbox to 20 minutes later. Nevertheless, the freaking iPhone is supposed to be all about freaking push, so I felt geekishly compelled to ferret out a way to have “Gmail push” on the darn thing. Solutions abound on forums all over the Web, but most end up with “use a forwarding service” (most of which you have to pay for). No thanks. Here is how to do it. It assumes you are using Mobile Me and Mail.app in addition to Gmail.
- Go to Mail.app’s preferences pane and select your Mobile Me account. Change the e-mail address to your gmail address, and change the SMTP server to the gmail SMTP server. Through mystical means (see next step), this allows you to, in effect, use the Mobile Me account on your iPhone as though it’s actually your Gmail account (“Reply” will let you reply from Gmail and not Mobile Me).
- Create the mystical means: open your Mobile Me preferences pane and make sure your two Mail options are selected. Check the box for mail syncing in iTunes as well, just for good measure. I’m actually not sure which one does the job, and my dedication for testing ends right here (if you know, leave a comment).
- Log into Gmail on the Web, and create a filter: “From: **”. Pick “Skip the Inbox,” “Mark as read,” “Apply label” (I chose “Forwarded mail,” but whatever works), and “Forward to” (fill in your Mobile Me address). This forwards all your Gmail messages to your Mobile Me Inbox but removes them from theGmail Inbox so you don’t end up with two copies of everything in your Mail.app inbox. I wouldn’t want to actually trust Mobile Me with KEEPING my e-mails since they evidently randomly lose people’s e-mail.
- On the iPhone, set up your Mobile Me account however you want it. Either don’t bother with the Gmail account or inactivate it. No reason to be polling for mail that you have just instructed NOT to appear in your Inbox.
That’s it. E-mails sent to your Gmail account will be “pushed” (in scare quotes because…sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t) to your iPhone through Mobile Me. They will show up in Mail.app’s Inbox, where they can be filed into Gmail IMAP folders just as if they’d arrived via Gmail’s inbox, and if you get squirrely and think you missed something, you’ve got your “Forwarded mail” folder with all the mails that have been sent to Mobile Me. Easy enough to empty it from time to time.
This is a helluva kludge and unworthy of both Apple and Google. Freaking Yahoo! has even got this figured out, for heaven’s sake. Having satisfied my geek side that it could be done, I undid it all and am just using Gmail IMAP on my iPhone. It gets there fast enough, and if I’m sitting at my laptop the “push” means I have to delete and deal with stuff twice more often than not because Mobile Me doesn’t reliably mark iPhone e-mails as read after I read them on my Mac. (This “feature” is a Big Pain in the Butt, although the effect is the same as getting e-mail pushed through POP to my BlackBerry.) But I felt I should post my findings anyway given that I pieced this solution together myself and therefore don’t know if it’s already out there somewhere (I couldn’t find it despite wasting hours of my life that I will never get back!).
UPDATE 12/21/08: I found an easier way to deal with this, and happily before I wrote about it I found that someone else already has. I don’t archive my Gmail copies, though; I leave them in my inbox so I can file them in Gmail. This is easy to deal with if you don’t get hundreds of e-mails a day (I don’t; most people seem to text me or Facebook me these days). It ends up being about like my BlackBerry system was; I had POP Gmail on the Berry because IMAP Gmail doesn’t push to BlackBerries either, so I had to deal with the inbox copies then too. Another possible downside is that the mails sent from the iPhone are stored in Mobile Me’s Sent folder, so if you really really want those in Gmail you have to go get them. But if you just want to know immediately that there is e-mail lurking for you, this is a workaround. Can I say again how bitter I am that Yahoo! can get this right but Gmail refuses? OK. Done.
Can Gmail push emails to the iPhone 3G? - Page 3 - The iPhone Blog Forums said
[...] Here’s a good way if you have Mobile Me and use Mail.app: Trick your iPhone (and yourself) into Gmail push � Not Nurse Ratched [...]
dizzy said
“use a forwarding service (most of which you have to pay for)”
mobileme cost money too
That’s why I use yahoo mail.
Details Here: http://whenwillapple.com/saywhy/2008/07/23/my-iphone-gmail-push-work-aroundthanks-ymail/
notratched said
True. As I said, this applies only to a subset of users: folks who already have Mobile Me. I doubt I’m the only one who wants to pay EXTRA money…
jay said
have gmail fwd to a mail2web account. It is free, no matter what kind of user you are… and it uses exchange to get the job done (wich is time-tested and corporation approved).
But none the less, all of the fwding “fixes” don’t push gmail to your iPhone which means that your gmail inbox won’t be all nice and tidy with conversations being collected into one nice neat thread.
Basically the team over at Google (as great as they are) needs to get their act together and push to iPhones.
After all, pretty much everything else you can do on an iPhone(except for 3rd party apps from the app store) is thanks to the great people at google, not at apple.
mbreese said
I go one step farther… I use Gmail to aggregate 2 other email addresses, and I wanted to be able to send mail from my phone using those two accounts. In order to do this, I had to create those accounts on my phone, but I set the POP server to ‘localhost’ (the phone). This stops all polling of those accounts. I then set the SMTP server to use the Gmail settings. Now I can send mail from my phone using whatever address I like, and it all routes though Gmail, so I have an archive of it all.
Again, it’s a kludge, but it works.
David Russell said
‘use a forwarding service” (most of which you have to pay for). No thanks.’
Erm… you have to pay for MobileMe last time I checked. No thanks.
Nick Savage said
I’ve been looking for a way to use push with Gmail recently. I tried mail2web, and I didn’t like it. This is perfect. Thanks!
kmcital said
If you send mail out through smtp.gmail.com from your mobileme account then they are in both Sent on MobileMe and in your gmail Sent also.
Rachel said
I got the first part but having trouble creating the filter.
I am actually paying for yahoo plus and have g-mail forwarded to that address. However, I am now getting 2 copies of each e-mail on my iphone and in Outlook.
Thanks!
Eric said
Top post, in my opinion is the best solution – I have all GMail forwarded to a ymail account (which pushes for free) and then when I log into the gmail and mark all as read – since I get them normally first on my phone via ymail – I also set up the account setting for gmail to update manually (since I have an intricate folder label system) this way I don’t get duplicate emails, but can still get access via a label if needed.
So Rachel, you will need to disable checking on gmail then to avoid getting duplicates. You can use the POP/Forwarding settings tab to tailor what action you want after getting it to your pc – I personally like using the Gmail IMAP protocol (same setup as on the iPhone) on my laptop.
Good luck all.
Tarzan said
Hi, I think I have an alternate solution, for those of you who wish to be notify when incoming messages arrive, to any inbox / account you may have:
Most mobile phone companies (Mobile Networks) offers their clients a free email account in the form of; YourMobileNumber “@” YourMobilecompanyDotCom
You can forward all other email accounts such as Gmail and Ymail.
Once a forwarded email arrives to your email account provided by your mobile phone operator, then, your mobile phone operator will send you an SMS to your mobile phone, almost instantly – and faster than any push mail system.
You just open the SMS message and it tells you from which of your multiple email address the message is coming from, who the sender is and part of the message (if you need to read more just reply and you will receive another sms containing another block of that particular email message.
The good thing of this, besides being notified instantly, is that you can decide to reply, later, or not, and you can reply either by using SMS or open your iPhone’s Safari or mail app and Bingo!
And if you reply either by login in into a particular email account, you will not have that problem of your email messages being duplicated or retained in another account, and when you reply you don’t have that problem of chosing a different reply address.
Now, if the incoming email (forwarded to your mobile email address ) is urgent and you need to reply right away, then you can reply by SMS.
If you only wish to be noify but not reply using your mobile phone email address, you can certanly choose not to so (as I do) and if you want to reply to that particular email from that particular email account, just open your iphone’s Safari, login and reply, or open your iphone’s mail app and reply.
Being notified by SMS by your mobile operator does not cost money, only when you send an SMS. And, as I mentioned before it is faster than any push service (MobileMe or Exchange) and you can save the 99 box that mobile me costs, or even more if you have an exhange account.
Contact your mobile phone operator for furter details
GF said
Life would be easier with gmail push, in the meanwhile I have started the trial run with MobileMe and am using that for the couple email addresses that I need to know about ASAP (ill parent, sibling overseas, etc). It’s working very well, we’ll see how much it’s needed for 99 a year tho, I tried the push with a ymail account and that just wasn’t working for me, if it did go sort of instantly, the messages weren’t displaying in my inbox properly and I disabled that.
My other gripe is the not being able to hear the email alert, especially when home and the phone isn’t literally with me, or if napping, etc. For that, I adjust my gmail filter to send those incoming emails to my cell phone as a text, which has more variety of sounds, that way I can hear it in the other room with a louder sound. Then, in the morning, I switch the filter back.
Reido said
If you do choose MobileMe, get it from amazon for around $60 instead of $90 from apple. A family account is only $90 at amazon too.