How to fix iPhone email problems: Definitive Guide (1 Viewer)

[Eric_L]

OK, I use Yahoo for my iPhone mail and it works wonderfully well, but I cannot seem to get my iMac to play as nicely. Does anyone here know why?

 

[rjrenjian]

Nurse: How do you feel after your operation? Patient: Quite alright, only I can feel two hearts beating inside me. Nurse: No wonder the doctor who operated on you was looking for his replica rolex everywhere just now.

 

[DaveF]

Three years later, this thread is of great interest to me again


Turning on IMAP ... fingers crossed... Last time I tried it, I didn't like how IMAP behaved with Apple Mail. But now with the iPhone, I'll give it another go. Tips and advice based on the past few years experience are welcome. I'm quite uncertain on getting the best experience for using Gmail with both Apple Mail desktop and iPhone clients.

 

[DaveF]

I can't get email to stay in the INBOX at Google; it's auto-archived All Mail. Which means it never appears in the INBOX of Apple Mail or iPhone Mail. I have to dig through the IMAP structure to get to mail. This doesn't seem right or desirable, but I can't find any mention of it online.



I gave up on IMAP and used the POP3 instructions with the "recent" feature, and at first test is working as desired. That'll teach me to second guess myself from three years ago

 

[DaveF]

And now it's not working

 

[DaveF]

And if you're silently watching my little saga it turned out to be something with the office wifi. I'm wondering if Corporate jiggered the network so iPhones don't play nice anymore. There's been rumors of such things going to happen.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Just can't fathom using Gmail with POP. IMAP is the way to go. Yes...you can't highlight and deleted hundreds or even dozens of messages at a time with the iPhone Mail client. But when I get home, I can just highlight all of those read or unwanted messages in Mail.app and delete them all in one fell swoop. And like magic...they disappear from the iPhone at the next connection.

 

[DaveF]

IMAP doesn't work right for me. With IMAP, Gmail doesn't map to the INBOX structure, but creates a new, unrelated Gmail directory structure. I have to dig through this directory, going at least two levels deep to get to ALL MAIL to see any messages. This also breaks the Unified Inbox. For me, it is a far worse system.


I spent several hours on it,and tried various online tips and tutorials, but nothing IMAP behave normally. Maybe it's just me, because no one commented that IMAP doesn't map correctly to INBOX.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

I'm not sure what happened there, Dave. I have three Gmail accounts set up in Mail.app and all three map to their respective individual Inboxes, and all can be viewed under the unified Inbox. The same is true for the Sent messages. I turned off keeping Draft messages on the server because I saw weird behavior...basically a copy of a message I was composing would be saving itself as a new message to the Drafts folder every few seconds. I do have the All Mail directory viewable in my sidebar, but I never look in there for anything. I assume you already tried recreating the account in Mail.app several times?

 

[Shane D]

i hate the unified inbox and then the list of inboxes. i like how it was before when i could go into each acount without havin to scroll down thru all the inboxes first.

 

[DaveF]

Michael,

Thanks for the followup. I'd prefer IMAP for the unified behavior across multiple clients. Unfortunately I didn't take screenshots to illustrate the behavior. POP works acceptably for me, but I'd like to try it again, since you've confirmed IMAP should work "normally".


If I give it a go, I may ask to compare notes with you on your your configuration.


Shane - I like the option of the unified inbox, but I do normally go to the individual inboxes since "personal" and "work" are quite different for me. But I only have two email accounts, so no scrolling is required for me.

 

[Shane D]

yeah i know some will like it, i just wish there was a on off switch for it.

 

[DaveF]

I deleted and recreated my email accounts in the iPhone and Apple Mail (after first archiving all email, to be safe). Redoing it in IMAP this time, and it's working as it should. So far, this seems an improvement over POP, with all clients sync'd to each other.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Nice...

Originally Posted by DaveF

I deleted and recreated my email accounts in the iPhone and Apple Mail (after first archiving all email, to be safe). Redoing it in IMAP this time, and it's working as it should. So far, this seems an improvement over POP, with all clients sync'd to each other.

 

[DaveF]

I see why you're such an advocate of it. I'm not sure how it works fully, in terms of local storage and folders. But so far it works "right". I need to tell Ron to switch to imap if he hasn't.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

You can create local "On My Mac" folders on your Mac for archiving messages that you no longer need on the server. But you can also create server based folders if you want messages outside of your Inbox, but that you still may want access to from another device...say an iPhone. You can also create rules to automatically move messages to folders based on whatever criteria you want (sender, date sent, etc)

 

[DaveF]

I had client rules for moving emails to local folders when I used POP. I'll checkout server-side folders and rules. New territory, new learnings