Get Spam-free Email on your iPhone
I’ve had my iPhone for months now and, until about two weeks ago, I was secretly unhappy with how it handled my email. You see, I get lots of email. Lots and lots, as a matter of fact, and it comes into twelve different accounts. I used to use Apple’s Mail to manage it on my MacBook, and all was good. But when I got my iPhone, I discovered that the phone’s lack of spam-filtering power made it literally unusable for my deluge of email.
Mail always sorted my mail invisibly, and its built-in spam filter kept the junk out of my Inbox. I use IMAP mail services, which means that all of my mail stays on the server, so I can access it from my MacBook, someone else’s computer via webmail or, I thought, my iPhone. But when I synced the accounts to the phone, the Inbox filled with spam so quickly that my actual email was lost in the mix.
It has taken me a while, but I’ve worked out a solution that leverages several great pieces of technology to make Mail on the iPhone work the way it should. Click onward to learn how I did it.
The truth is that this is pretty easy. All I’ve done is send all of my personal email to a secret Gmail account that nobody knows about. Then I connect to Gmail from the phone and Gmail’s powerful server-side filters keep the junk out. The only hang-up is that when I send people mail, I want them to receive it from my personal account, not my Gmail… but there’s a fix for that, too.
Step one is to get a Gmail account. Even if you already have one, go ahead and send yourself an invitation for another one and give it a crazy log-in that nobody will ever know. Once the new account is created, tell your other email account to auto-forward all of your mail to your secret Gmail account. This means that any mail sent to your personal account will show up in your new Gmail account.
The next step is to fix things on Gmail’s end so that when you send people mail, it looks like its coming from your personal account and not your secret Gmail identity. You can do that from within the Gmail interface in your web browser. Click on the Settings link in the upper-right corner of the Gmail interface (next to your secret name) then click on the Accounts tab. The first option says “Send mail as:” and there’s a link there to add another email address. Click it.
n the resulting pop-up, add your personal account and then check it. Google will have sent you a verification email with a link in it to click to prove that you can access that account. Once you do that, head back to the Settings screen and click the link to make your new “Send As” address the default.
Whew! Once that’s finished, you can add the Gmail account to your iPhone. One caveat: DO NOT use the iPhone’s built-in Gmail account tool when you add the account. Instead, set the account up as an Other account, then click the IMAP tab and use the following values:
IMAP Account Information
Name: What you want your name to appear as when you send
Address: Your personal email address (not the secret Gmail address)
Description: Whatever you want
Incoming Mail Server
Host Name: imap.gmail.com
User Name: Your secret Gmail login (without the @gmail.com part)
Password: Duh.
Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)
Host Name: smtp.gmail.com
User Name: Your secret Gmail login (without the @gmail.com part)
Password: Duh.
You can look at the Advanced settings, but you shouldn’t have to touch them unless you want to. When you’re done, you should be all set up. Now when someone sends an email to your personal account it will show up on your phone via Gmail, but when you respond it will look like your response came from your original account, not your Gmail. If you like, you can even add the account to Mail on your Mac.
Excellent idea. Great post.
Using “Send mail as:” option will reveal your orignal account in MS Outlook. At least in 2007 edition.
Am I wrong?
Or you could just have gotten the brilliant SpamSieve, kept your accounts the way they were, and skipped the whole Gmail deal you just described.
@Mark: Am I missing something? Your proposed solution requires you to have Mail.app running on another Mac at all times. Dan’s solution doesn’t.
Mark,
I didn’t mention it in my article because I didn’t want to complicate the issue, but I do use Spam Sieve. The problem, as Mike points out, is that Spam Sieve is a client-side spam filter, which means that it only works on spam that has already been downloaded to my MacBook. In this way, it is no better than Mail’s built-in filter.
(Of course, it is a far better filter than the one built into Mail… but it is still limited to client-side filtering.)
Gmail’s filter, on the other hand, is a server-side filter; it cleans the spam out *before* you download it to whatever mail client you are using (Mail, on your MacBook or the Mail client on your iPhone). In this way, it is far superior to Spam Sieve, which is why I use it.
I’ve been tossing very similar issues around for a couple of months, and just released a new iPhone email service… MailCurve. Take a look, at http://www.mailcurve.com. The iPhone allowed us to a unique approach… you may find it useful.
Thanks,
Mac
mir se vini ne forum ma te riun ne internet dhe ma e mirin
Thats awesome! thanks! i was wonderin how to do that
Okay, so maybe I missed a basic step, but now when I send an e-mail from the iphone with this setup, the ‘from’ in outlook says ‘My Full Name [secretgmailaccount@gmail.com] on behalf of My Full Name [my_personal_email@domain.com]‘
How do I make the whole ‘on behalf of’ stuff go away and make it from ‘My Full Name my_personal_email@domain.com‘?
Thanks!!
Alekca1988@meta.ua
not good
Quote:
“Okay, so maybe I missed a basic step, but now when I send an e-mail from the iphone with this setup, the ‘from’ in outlook says ‘My Full Name [secretgmailaccount@gmail.com] on behalf of My Full Name [my_personal_email@domain.com]’
How do I make the whole ‘on behalf of’ stuff go away and make it from ‘My Full Name my_personal_email@domain.com’?
Thanks!!”
I have the samne issue here. Can anybody help with solving this?
Thanks,
Peter
Haha, nice. Works perfect.
I have several issues with this. For one, everything in my Inbox on the iPhone says it’s from me (since it was forwarded from my personal email) and when I hit “Reply” it goes back to that personal email address instead of the original sender. And I have the same problem as mentioned above – when I send a message from my iPhone, it lists the sender as “xxx@gmail.com on behalf of xxx@insightbb.com“. Plus, now the mail on my iPhone is acting squirrelly – it won’t let me delete emails and it keeps saying I have new emails when I don’t.
So far, not impressed with email on iPhone!
Hi and thank you to everyone, but I’ve really tried to follow the story but to me, as a newbie and an old one at that, I’m overwhelmed with information.
I have an iPhone 3G and would like to reduce spam. I see that using Gmail will help.
I have a main email account which is a POP3 or is it IMAP (****@*********.freeserve.co.uk)
I also have a Gmail account, which is on my PC and on my iPhone 3G.
Could someone simply list the settings that each device should have?
Thank you in advance.
This works perfectly! Setup was simple and easy, great idea.
For those who are having problems, you don’t deserve an iPhone…
Thank you so much! I have been so frusterated with apple and the lack of respect they give to large email inboxes. There are so many people mad at thier iphones. I only wish i had found your website earlier. I love getting new emails with out maually trashing my inbox. That was the biggest productivity killer. This is a must fix for every corp user.
You need to do the server-side forward. All the emails are coming from your personal account and replying there because you do the forward in the client like outlook or something like that.
It works magnificently, and is indeed quite simple to configure. It was the only thing that kept bugging me about my lovely iPhone. Thanks!
Brilliant!
Works like a charm with my iphone. Great article!
Thanks
Thanks so much. I’m so grateful to have found your article as I was spending way too much time deleting spam from my IPhone!
Ok. I have followed the above instructions to a T. Emails being sent to my personal address are successfully being forwarded to my “secretnamethat nobodywillguess@gmail.com” address. However, I have not succeeded in sending messages from my “secretnamethatnobodywillguess@gmail.com” address, and having it appear that it was sent from my personal address. The address that appears in the “From” box is “secretnamethatnobodywillguess@gmail.com” . I’m a little confused at this point, because I followed the instructions.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
shoot! I really want this to work but I am having the same problem as dobberj3. I can’t get my responses from my iPhone to show up as from my non-secret account. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
This is awesome!!!! thanks
Thanks for this tip!
Question: Server folders- If want to create folders to store emails for this forwarded account do I create them within gmail? And will they sync on the iPhone?
Works fine for me. Thanks 10**6 Dan!
If the return e-mail address is showing your secret address, did you possibly put your secret address into the imap setting instead of:
Address: Your personal email address (not the secret Gmail address) ?
Know what Dan… Saying “thanks” just once just isn’t saying it often enough for how big a problem your idea solved for me. “Thanks” to you there’s actually a USEABLE e-mail feature on my iPhone now!
And and there certainly wasn’t before.
“Thanks” Dan
It has stopped the spam.
Excellent.
It does send mail with an address of my choosing in the “from” field but only when I send emails from the gmail page in Safari.
From the Mail app and from my iPhone all sent emails show the gmail address.
More than one person above me has this problem.
No one has an answer yet.
I really would love to get this working properly, please help
Looks like about half of people who try this have luck. I suspect that different mail servers treat the outgoings differently.
Guys who are complaining that your from email is not the secret email (secretemail@gmail.com) try replying to a test email and see if the reply is your regular email address. I bet it is. This trick does work, it just seems to not hide the sending gmail address for everyone.
JD “For those who are having problems, you don’t deserve an iPhone…” Please go somewhere else loser. Everyone deserves an iphone. We hate mac snobs here.
thanks for the great work-around. i just set this up on my phone and it seems to work great….however, i’m not seeing a copy in my “sent items” folder on my iphone…is this normal, or do i need to tweak something in order to retain a copy?
I was having the same problem as some people noted above with secret email address also appearing as a “on behalf of” on mail sent from my iphone.
I managed to fix it by changing the outgoing mail server on my iphone settings so it uses a different one. (ie turn off smtp.gmail.com and turned on my vodafone one, but you could use whatever you have avaliable)
Hope that helps some people as this solution has been great for me in saving a huge amount of time by not having to deal with iphone spam email overload, thanks heaps Dan.
Cheers
Chris
My email address has been around for about 8 years, it’s on the net, and all my clients have it. Desktop filtering via Outlook works fine, however when I got my iPhone, SPAM was killing me. This was simple and did the trick!
Thank you kind sir!
Hey Dan, just wanted to say really well done! The method works great and further improves functionality.
Ironically the mail I’m receiving on my phone has less spam than the filter on my home computer is providing.
Thank you very much my man!
I hope you still check this Dan. Back to step one. How do you get the email to auto forward to the gmail account. I can set the rule in Mail (mac) but that means it only works if Mail is up and running. Is there a way to get this to work when I am away from home, when I don’t want to leave the computer running all the time? Mike’s reply on March 8th 2008 implies that you can do this with your method. Thanks
There is one way around it showing your ’secret’ gmail address – and that is use something sensible. Instead of using an unintelligible gmail address ie ‘nobuggerwill guessthisone’ – I’ve created one that makes it clear its from my mobile eg: ‘FromJoeBloggsMobile’. Replies still go to your non-gmail account and are forwarded to your iphone via gmail – and remember the whole purpose of this was not to create a secret account so much as to use Gmail’s powerful spam filter that the iphone doesn’t by itself provide.
This is great. Not bothered that with the secret bit because all I needed was the spam filter. On an old personal address of mine email on the iPhone was almost impossible to use due to volumes of spam and thos has completely corrected this problem. Thanks for the post Dan.
Just remember your email is not private with gmail, esp if you have clients and are under NDA.
Good idea which I actually do use for Gmail’s superior filtering but bothering to make the email account something complex is a waste of time since I believe that info is available in the header of each email. I could be wrong but 99% sure that is the way it is.
-Peter
Works like an absolute dream – thanks so much. Steve
This is so great! Thanks so much!
Can anyone tell me…do I just turn the mobileme mail acccount off on my phone now? Because I’m getting notifications twice for every email received this way.
I have a bunch of folders on mobileme that I’ll need to transfer to gmail somehow.
I was going to set up gmail in Mail on my mac. Then drag and drop them over onto the gmail inbox. Will this work??
Thanks again!
ok, working well so far, BUT, i have 2 active mail accounts (neither are gmail)…
I want to only get mail on my .mac acct, so what I am trying is instead of making a new gmail IMAP acct on my phone is simply forwarding my mail from the secret gmail acct to my .mac account. Does that mac sense?
The reason I just dont use my .mac acct is that I have an email that 20 years worth of clients are used to and is very easy to remember. I want them to be able to email that acct, and it get forwarded/filtered (secret gmail acct) and then forward those emails to my .mac acct.
But then when I respond from the .mac acct it shows up as .mac, not the newly disguised original old email that is now the secret gmail acct….
so far it works great. if it continues to work I will just delete the older email off my iPhone and use the .mac acct (now mobile me) since it is all being forwarded to that account after it is filtered, thanks!
I was working on a similar concept when I stumbled on this article. There’s just one thing I would do differently to alleviate some of the concern listed.
Instead of “auto-foward” set you original mail to be “redirected” to the new gmail account. This way, you get the email from the original sender instead of from yourself. If you don’t have access to a mail server in which to do this, then you may have to stick with the auto-forward.
It’s working great for me. Great article
Great article!!
I’m also using the option in the gmail settings/accounts window to check other POP accounts as I can’t get in and set that account to forward. It works great! The iPhone lets me select a “send from address” so I can send from the correct address even though I can’t set it up in the “send mail as” section. As to the posting above – my servers forward emails with the original sender’s address in them. Maybe different servers act differently so check yours out.
– Billy
oops – wait – I spoke too soon – I’m having the same problem as half the people – it send back from my secret address instead of the default one I’ve selected.
Okay – I discovered something now (sorry for the string of posts) that may solve the probloem half of us are having.
on the iPhone in the IMAP account information area I’ve entered an address other than my secret gmail address. When I do this the iphone DOES send from whichever default address I have selected on the gmail website even though I have “Reply from the same address the message was sent to” checked.
When I change that setting back to the secret gmail address they are all sent from that address.
Weird workaround but it’s working now.
Now I’m actually thinking of getting a normal gmail address and doing it from there so people will at least know it’s from me. I normally use several email addresses for different businesses and not one takes precedence over another so this may be the best solution for me. YMMV
– Billy
Thank you!! It worked great EXCEPT…
is anyone else having a new problem with the always bcc myself after setting this up. I am finding that reciepients are getting doubles of each email. When i turn off the ‘always bcc myself’ the problem disappears. BUT that feature (the bcc) is crucial for me. Any thought?
I’m sure someone already pointed this out but the gmail address is exposed in the headers of the email, also people using outlook will see
person@email.com on behalf of user@gmail.com
I get around this by just setting up my SMTP server to use my ISP’s email server with SMTP auth enabled. That way I am not sending through gmail.
ok