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…