Easily Setting up IMAP for the iPhone

Question

The email client application on the iPhone is a bit lean but it's easy to use. When using POP email it downloads the entire message (and attachments if present). If you get a lot of email this takes time and can really eat up your battery. Also, if travelling outside of the U.S., as I do often, the roaming data charges can be high. Web based email will also be expensive as web pages need to be downloaded onto the iPhone.
IMAP type email lets the email and attachments sit on a remote server and you see only the subect and header in your inbox. When you find something you want to read then you can open it. Attachments are also not downloaded automatically. This saves the amount of data exchanged and your battery and potentially can be much cheaper overseas.
The problem is that not everyone has access to an IMAP email account or service. I currently have three POP accounts. two personal and one for my work. I asked our IT manager if he could activate IMAP on our Exchange server and he said no as he would need to open another port and that is a potential security risk. They do forward my work email to a proxy email account I have so I can read it at home with my non-Outlook computer.
I finally came upon a fairly good solution that I have been testing out. There are several email services available that use IMAP. Some are free and some cost a modest amount. I finally selected FastMail.FM (I believe they are in the U.K.). Their IMAP service has a lot of options available with it and one of which allows you to poll outrside POP accounts. I set up an email account with them and FastMail reads my three POP accounts every 2 hours and dumps them into my IMAP inbox.
I now have only one email account for my iPhone (now IMAP) for my three POP accounts. I find the iPhone in IMAP email mode a little easier to use (if that's possible) and deletion of emails from the iPhone is easier (an edit button will appear in IMAP mode). Attachments are also more stable as it is possible to lose an attachment in POP mode if you don't download a message fully and then try to download it again. I tried email messages with PDF and DOC attachments and everything worked OK.
FastMail also has their own SMTP servers so you won't get into the occasional snafu that occurs when you attempt to use the SMTP server from your own ISP. One thing though, they have four different options available for accounts. "Member" status seems the best ($35/year) as it has large mailbox, storage and data allotments.
I went up to the ATT website to look at data usage and it's truly modest in IMAP mode. Checking email with no new emails appears to be in the 4 to 6 KB area and downloading 20 or so message headers looks like to be in th 15 -20 KB zone. I'll be tracking this over the next few days and I'll post the results.
Mini + iPhone   Mac OS X (10.4.10)  
Mini + iPhone   Mac OS X (10.4.10)  
Mini + iPhone   Mac OS X (10.4.10)  

Answer 1

Two things would solve this problem for 99% of iPhone
users I think:
1) Gmail needs to get IMAP implemented.
There is a simple and elegant solution to the Gmail IMAP problem, and it doesn't require deleting all your outgoing messages as some "solutions" have recommended.
1. Go to http://mail.aol.com/ and sign up for a free AOL email account (which will be [email protected])
2. Log on to your AOL email, go into Settings, and turn the spam filters off
3. Log on to your Gmail account, go into Settings > Forwarding and POP
4. Set your Gmail to "Forward a copy of incoming mail to:" [email protected] (also choose whether you want the original to stay in your gmail inbox or get archived)
5. Set up the email account on your iPhone as follows:
- Type of account: Other > IMAP
- Incoming email account: imap.aol.com (use youraolusername and AOL email password for incoming email)
- Outgoing email account: smtp.gmail.com:587 (use [email protected] and Gmail password)
6. Under Advanced settings, have it delete the messages from the server after downloading them. (Optional, but there's no point in leaving them on the AOL server)
Voila! You get:
1. IMAP access to your Gmail inbox (thru the AOL proxy...don't worry, the emails won't look any different than if you got them straight from gmail)
2. Outgoing emails will be sent through Gmail (nobody has to know the AOL account even exists)
3. Messages sent on your home computer will no longer be downloaded onto your iPhone (since that's a function of POP that's particular to Gmail, and does not occur with IMAP)
4. Sent emails will remain with their threads and do not have to be fished out of the trash if you want to be able to search them later (remember that messages in the Gmail trash are automatically deleted after 30 days)