Email on the iPhone for Very Picky People

Editor’s Note: Please read the update featured at the bottom of this post for the latest on my quest for the perfect mobile email solution.

Right up front: I’m picky about email.

– I want one universal inbox where all messages arrive. I don’t want to have to pull mail from multiple accounts.

– I want a clean, empty inbox. Incoming messages should be replied to or acted upon; after this, they should be deleted.

– I detest spam. I don’t want to see it, and I will not pick through a spam filter, looking for misidentified messages.

– I want a permanent, searchable archive of every message I send or receive. I don’t want this archive subdivided into dozens of folders. I don’t want to have to “tag” my email. When I need an old message, I want to find it using a simple search.

– I want to deal with an email one time. If I delete it on my iPhone, it should vanish from my desktop. If I delete it on my desktop, it should vanish from my iPhone.

– I want to use my email address that I’ve been using for years. When I send email to someone, whether I send it from my desktop, my web mail client, or my iPhone, I want that email to appear to come from one email address I specify.

– I don’t want messages sent from my iPhone to pop up in my Inbox. Messages I send should be copied to my permanent email archive … but I shouldn’t receive a copy of every email I send out in my Inbox, as though it were a new message.

If you handle email the way I do, you won’t be happy with the way the iPhone, right out of the box, handles email. You will, however, love the following instructions, which make iPhone email work exactly this way.

I. Disclaimer. This fix is really pretty simple, and takes longer to read about than it does to set up. I’m also aware there are several services out there that do the tricks I’m outlining below; that said, to limit confusion, I’m sharing the specific things I’ve done, because I know they work.

II. What You Need. To mirror my setup, you’ll need:

– a personal email address you want to share with the world (this could be a personal account, a Gmail account, an over-priced and under-featured “dot Mac” account, an AOL account, a Yahoo! account … any kind of account you like — or even an email alias, as long as you can program it to forward everything received to an email address you specify.

– a free Gmail account.

– an IMAP email account from TuffMail.com (free for the first 30 days; adequate storage for my needs starts at $34.00 per year). You can define the email address associated with this mailbox, but the address itself doesn’t matter … because you aren’t going to share this address with anyone, ever, world without end, amen.

– an iPhone.

III. What To Do. Set up is actually pretty easy:

STEP ONE) Make Gmail your universal inbox. Set all existing email addresses and aliases you own to forward all mail to your Gmail account. Why? Well, in addition to creating the one, singular Universal Inbox of your dreams, this subjects all your incoming email to Google’s excellent spam filters and creates a persistent, comprehensive, off-site, searchable backup of every email you ever receive.

(Of course, if you use a Gmail address as your personal, public, “share it with the world” email address, you can skip this step.)

STEP TWO) Tell Gmail to forward all mail it receives to your top-secret TuffMail email address. Because Gmail has spam-washed your mail prior to it being forwarded, your TuffMail address will only receive crisp, clean, spam-free messages. Ahhhh.

To do this:

– Within Gmail, go to Settings/Forwarding and POP.

– Select “Forward a copy of incoming mail to [your Tuffmail address] and [archive Gmail’s copy].

Don’t worry about POP settings. You aren’t going to be POPping Gmail from anywhere, ever again.

STEP THREE) Set Gmail to stamp all outgoing messages with the personal email address you specify. This is actually pretty easy to do.

– Through Gmail’s web interface, go to Settings/Accounts. Under “Send Mail As:”, add the email address you want stamped on all outgoing Gmail. (Do NOT use your top-secret Tuffmail address here!)

The first time you do this, Gmail will send a test message to the account you specify to verify that this email address is, indeed, an address you own. You may have to respond to a verification email before you can use this feature. Details here.

– Select “Always reply from my default address.”

STEP FOUR) Create an IMAP mailbox, associated with your TuffMail account, on your iPhone. Don’t POP (or pull mail from) directly from Google, or you’ll screw everything up. Don’t have other Inboxes on your iPhone, or you’ll screw everything up. Have one account on your iPhone: the TuffMail account.

Go to Settings/Mail/Add Account. Under Account Information, enter:

– Name: (Your name here.)

– Address: (The email address you want the world to see — NOT your top-secret TuffMail address!)

– Description: (I used “Tuffmail”)

For the incoming mail server, enter:

– Host Name: mail.mxes.net

– User Name: (Your Tuffmail username, supplied in the welcome email. Be aware this is not exactly like your email address. Depending on the domain name you specified when you established the account, it will look something like this: youraddress_yourdomain.com).

– Password: The password associated with your Tuffmail account.

For the outgoing mail server, enter the information associated with your Gmail account:

– Host Name: smtp.gmail.com:587

– Username: (Your Gmail address)

– Password: (Your Gmail password)

STEP FIVE) Configure your desktop email client to check your top-secret Tuffmail account and only your top-secret Tuffmail account. Set this account up exactly the way you did the one on your iPhone, using Tuffmail’s information for the incoming server and Gmail’s information for the outgoing, SMTP server.

IV. Benefits of Doing It My Way. If you set things up exactly as I’ve outlined them here:

– You’ll have the wonderful sense of peace that comes from having one, universal inbox. You will know the quasi-orgasmic joy of dealing with every email once and only once.

– Your inbox will stay clean; your iPhone and destop inboxes will always be synchronized.

– You’ll see very little, if any, spam. Every message you receive will have passed through Gmail’s excellent spam filter. (If you like, you can even activate the spam filters on the Tuffmail server, giving you double protection. Me? I think that’s overkill.)

– Gmail will quietly, automatically, and in the background create a permanent, searchable archive of every message you send or receive, whether it comes from your desktop email client, Gmail’s web client, or your iPhone.

– Email arrives simultaneously on your desktop client and iPhone. Delete an email on the desktop, and it vanishes from your iPhone seconds later. Delete an email on the iPhone, and it disappears from your desktop seconds later. (Remember: all email, deleted or not, will persist in your Gmail archive.)

– You can use the email address you’ve been using for years. The only email address people will ever see is the one, single, public email address you want them to see. Your use of Gmail and Tuffmail will be totally invisible to everyone in the world.

– Messages you send from your iPhone won’t appear in your Inbox. Those messages will, however, be archived by Google, so you can get to them if you want them.

– If you should ever need a copy of an email you’ve sent or received, you may retrieve it from Google’s archive through any web browser in the world.

PS: Special Note to “Dot Mac” Users. If you’re a “Dot Mac” user, then, like me, you were duped into purchasing an over-priced, under-featured email account from Apple. Because “Dot Mac” offers IMAP-based email, you may be considering using your “Dot Mac” service in lieu of the Tuffmail arrangement I recommend above.

Apple’s implementation of IMAP on Dot Mac sucks. I’ve tried it, and I hate working with it. So do yourself a favor: drop Dot Mac and get a Tuffmail account.

UPDATE: For those seeking iPhone email nirvana, seek no more. Go get a free Google account with IMAP access, and you will have all the benefits described above without the expense and complication of a hidden Tuffmail account. Details here.