iPhone: Using Gmail to control email (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

Hoping someone here can help.

I receive 300 spam messages per day. Because of this, when
I set up my normal POP3 account on iPhone I was flooded with
nearly 2,000 pieces of mail. Despite the fact I have set iPhone
settings to show only recent mail and to delete old mail, I still
get a huge amount of spam that can't be easily deleted.

So, it was suggested I use GMAIL to forward my POP3 account
through, removing spam, and getting only what I need on the iPhone.

Since I already had a GMAIL account it seemed easy enough.
I went to SETTINGS->ACCOUNTS->ADD ANOTHER EMAIL ACCOUNT

I set up my GMAIL account on my iPhone. The mail actually
did forward to the iPhone without a trace of spam. BRAVO!

But here are the problems....

1. On the GMAIL webside, my INBOX has downloaded thousands
of pieces of email from the past few weeks. I need to find a way to
limit this.

2. My POP3 mail server does NOT allow a copy of mail to be kept
on the server after download. This is a huge problem. So, once it is
downloaded to GMAIL->iPhone I can't access those same messages
from my Mac desktop or laptop.

I need be able to send a copy of everything that comes from my
POP3 account -> GMAIL (and iPhone) -> back to POP3 account so
I can access it on other computers.

If anyone is using Gmail and has mastered these problems, please
let me know how you did it.

Would also appreciate any tips on filter setups or any other settings
I need to note on the GMAIL website or the iPhone itself.

Thank You in advance!

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I think I just figured it out....

Simply create an email account in Mac mail for Gmail

 

[DaveF]

Ron, that's what I did: I have a Gmail account in Mail and receive and send email via Gmail. My domain simply auto-forwards all email to Gmail. Gmail's docs are pretty good for configuring Apple Mail. Or feel free to email me; I can look at my system settings.

I believe the key Gmail settings to pay attention to are:
* "Forwarding and POP". As you're accessing this from multiple computers, I think you'll want to use "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)" enabled. (For my one computer, I think I use "Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on". I have the "When messages are accessed with POP" setting at "archive Gmail's copy", as it suits me.)

* "Accounts"
I changed my "Send Mail As" default to my [email protected] , so email from Gmail looks as if it comes from my normal address. Likewise, you can set it to use your HTF email if you desire, rather than your GMail address.

Likewise, choose the "When I receive a message sent to one of my addresses" according to your preference. Mine always uses my default address option.

* In Apple Mail, go to Preferences->Accounts->Account Information->Email Address and set this to the email address you set in the previous step for Gmail. This way all emails sent from your Mac via your Gmail account appear to come from your desired email address.

Thus, all email I receive from and sent via Gmail appear to come from shoutingman.com not gmail.com

Hope that helps.

Finally: I've had one significant false positive on Gmail's spam filtering that caused me to miss my bill on my domain name. That's the only issue I'm aware of in a year of use. So if you think you're late in receiving an important mail, search your spam box.

I expect that you'll know in a week or two if this is a good method for you. If not, you can easily return to your former method without any loss of email.


Happy emailing!

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Dave,

First, thanks for the help. Yours is the very first that is detailed
so that an idiot could follow it

This idiot is still having problems....

Even though I specifically selected in GMAIL FORWARD AND POP:
ENABLE POP ONLY FOR MAIL THAT ARRIVES FROM NOW ON
Gmail is still sending a crapload of old messages to my Mac and
my iPhone.

The spam filtering is great, but I only want today's messages delivered.

 

[DaveF]

Ron,
We're quickly moving beyond my knowledge fo Gmail and email and I'm off to see Ratatouille. But a few thoughts and perhaps we can find a solution later today:

* Is your iPhone only getting email from Gmail currently? And not from Verizon?

* I don't get any email from Gmail's spam folder. The junkload of email you get on your iPhone, does it include any spam from Gmail's SPAM folder?

* Double check and click the accept button for the email settings.

Oops, I'm off...

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Hope you enjoyed Ratatouille. By the time you return I'll be at a BBQ

Quickly....

Only getting mail from GMAIL which is forwarding just my
Home Theater Forum email account.

All the Spam Mail is blocked on the iPhone, which is great.
Only getting GOOD mail.

Problem is, old messages are still being downloaded on both
the Mac mail and iPhone

 

[Craig S]

Ron, try this setting on your iPhone - it should stop the flow of old mesages there:

Settings -> Mail -> GMail (under Accounts) -> Advanced -> Use Recent Mode = OFF

Turning the Recent Mode setting OFF stopped the flood on my iPhone (I know, it's counterintuitive, but it worked for me).

As far as your Mac Mail goes - I have run into this with my POP client before (in playing with the settings on GMail). I think once I set it to "enable POP for all messages" it started the flood. I would think setting in back to "arrives from now on" would stop it, but POP is dumb, so ...

At any rate, what I did to just get through it was to set a rule to send ALL messages to a temporary folder, and set that rule as the only one which ran. That kept all the old messages from getting distributed throughout my folders where they would be hard to find (I have a lot of folders and a lot of rules to sort my mail into them). Then I just kept forcing the download from GMail (which I could only get to send 300 or so at a time) until it had caught up tp the current date. Then I just deleted the temporary folder and all the dupes within it went too.

Note: I did the above back when I was still on Outlook, but I think you could set up something similar with Mac Mail. It's brute force, but it's the only way I could come up with quickly to deal with the situation.

The big problem here is just that POP is an old, not too smart protocol. I've realized that I do NOT want to run a POP client on my phone. I just want to look at new mails, not create a whole new repository. And I do not want it interfering with my main POP client by marking mails as downloaded.

So I've gone to using GMail's mobile web interface through Safari. Yeah, it's ugly, but it works for me for now. Google has a Java-based mobile client for some phones (include the Samsung I used until Saturday) which was a nice interface into the web mail. It let me read messages, delete stuff I didn't want, and even respond. And it wasn't POP so it didn't mess with download status. Obviously that won't work with the iPhone (no Java), but I wouldn't be surprised to see an iPhone-formatted web interface from Google at some point in the near future.

I'm staying away from the iPhone mail client, nice as it is, until GMail goes IMAP, or until they add a mode which works like the older GMail mobile client I've described above.

 

[DaveF]

for Ratatouille. Storms rolling through rained out our outdoors plans.

To better understand, I setup Thunderbird in Windows / Parallels to test multiple account access. This is more complex than I expected.

What I see is that using "Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on" doesn't let me access new or old email from both clients -- only the first to check for new email will download it. After that it's not available to other clients for download.

I have to switch to "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)" Thunderbird gets old messages in batches of ~300 and requires multiple checks to get my entire history.

The downside is that Apple Mail starts getting all my old messages too; it doesn't recognize that its imported history contains all these messages. The good news is that I can easily select and delete the new messages in my Inbox.

This is a more substantial shift than I realized from my single-client use. I fear you would have to set Gmail to enable pop for all mail, as we've talked, but then ALL your clients (MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, iPhone) will first have download your entire Gmail history, get caught, and can then start acting normally in getting new messages.

I don't know if this is worth the effort to test out. I hope I've not steered you wrong. But I'm testing this as I type; I've gotten 1400 of my 1800 Gmail messages on Thunderbird and I'm letting Apple Mail have at it too to test this out.

Maybe it won't be so bad.

Craig's option, using Gmail on your iPhone might be OK, except you still have two Macs to both get your mail with, so I'm not sure that's really workable for you.

 

[DaveF]

I found a solution that would work in general, but doesn't with Apple Mail.

Use Gmail's Recent Mode to enable clients to get email even after it was grabbed before by other email clients.

This works with Thunderbird on Windows. It doesn't work with my Apple Mail. It just doesn't get emails, period. If you've still got a contact at Apple, I suggest inquiring. This is a serious weakness, to me.

More creative solutions are required, if Apple Mail has this bug I'm experiencing.
1) Move to Thunderbird on your Mac Pro and MBP and use Recent: mode

or

2) Create two new Gmail accounts, so you have three: one for each computer. Set each to auto-forward a copy to another. Each machine would then get email only from its Gmail account. Inelegant and untested. Might work.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Dave,

You hit the nail on the head.

The problem with using GMAIL is that if you own more than one device
that downloads email, only the first device receives the email. The
others do not.

I love the fact that GMAIL removed all the spam and that I am
only getting essential mail to my iPhone --- but now my Mac Pro
and Macbook cannot get access to that mail.

I am disabling GMAIL. Rumors are high that Apple is working on
a software fix for their mail. Until then, I'll tolerate the out-of-control
messages.

Thanks for all your help, Dave. You knew what you were talkin' about.

 

[DaveF]

Ron, sorry it didn't work out.

Honestly, I believe this is an Apple Mail issue. Gmail allows multiple computers to check via POP but for unknown reasons Apple Mail can't handle the method (at least on my system).

I hope you're able to find a manageable solution -- it's a shame not to use the iPhone to its fullest.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Not sure how your Mail.app and Gmail settings are configured, but I have multiple Gmail accounts and I'm able to retrieve mail from them on multiple devices including two Macs, an iPhone and a Treo.

 

[DaveF]

Michael -- do you have multiple Mail.app clients checking the same Gmail account? If so, can you describe how you did it? I can't get my Mail program to use Gmail's "recent" setting, with a "recent:[email protected]". If this works, it ought to wholly resolve Ron's iPhone spam problem.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

I just turned off the preference in Mail.app to remove the Gmail messages from the server after retrieval.

 

[TonyD]

you guys must be doing something with your email
that i dont follow.

are you reading the email offline?
i keep seeing the term downlowding the email.

i just go to gmail.com and read my email.
i delete what i dont want but mostly i just archive it since you dont have to delete anything from gmail if you dont want to.

i can log into my gmail from any computer or anything that gives you access to the internet.


what am i missing here?

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

They're esentially using a Gmail account as conduit to filter spam prior to accessing it via POP on an iPhone. Nobody wants to access Gmail's webmail interface on an iPhone's screen...zoom or not. It's a pain in the ass.

 

[DaveF]

I've got that set as well; it doesn't make any difference. Once a message is read by one client, it's marked as such and another client won't get it via POP.

So, I'm baffled how you have multiple computers reading the same Gmail account. If you can explain it to Ron, it will solve his spam problem.

 

[DaveF]

As Michael said, I use Gmail as a spam filter. I also download my email locally for long-term storage and backup. But i also use Gmail to check email when away from home.

The big question, though, is how to download mail form Gmail using more than one system, like a Mac and an iPhone. As far as I can tell, Mail doesn't work with Gmail's "recent" mode, but Michael says it works for him, to my puzzlement.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

I'm not a mail administrator, but I don't think there's anything on the server side preventing POP messages from being downloaded to more than one machine or mail client. It's normally the client side that keeps track of what has been downloaded.

 

[DaveF]

My meager understanding is that it's a POP thing. On the server-side (Gmail), once an email is downloaded, it's marked as such. If a client requests mail subsequently, that mail isn't downloaded.

I saw this when I had both Thunderbird and Mail downloading from Gmail. Send myself a test message. If Thunderbird downloaded the message from Gmail, then Mail wouldn't get it, and vice versa.

Gmail's recent mode is specifically to work around this limitation. And I got it to work with Thunderbird: If Mail downloaded messages, Thunderbird using Recent would also get them. But I can't get Mail to use recent mode; it just stalls and fails to get any mail (new or old) in that config.

I may misunderstand something -- I probably do -- which is why I'm so keen on understanding whether you've got something set specifically to allow you to have more than one Mac get mail from the same Gmail account using Mail.app. Or if my system is acting abnormally.