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Setting Up MobileMe To Send & Receive POP3 Email On iPhone & Mac
Hey all
I’ve been looking for a way of setting up MobileMe to send & receive emails from my POP3 email accounts for a few days now, every solution that I came across had issues, until now (so far so good!).
Note: This does not use mail forwarding. I wasn’t keen on that…
The problem: I run a personal @me.com address and a work POP3 account. The POP3 account always annoyed me as I always wanted one place to login in and send and receive emails from, no matter what account I wanted to use.
I tried GMail and Hotmail as repositories for my POP3 email but being a business owner, I couldn’t cope with the email that I sent from my GMail / Hotmail inbox through my work’s POP3 account being shown as:
From: Mark A (mark@workaddy.com on behalf of mark@gmailaddy.com)I just think it looks unprofessional, like having a GMail as your main business account. No, I needed to be able to see all emails to both accounts in one place, but the recipient not know that I’d actually sent any mail from a free public service…
The issue above arises when you try and send POP email through a GMail / Hotmail server. Boo.
How MobileMe Has Saved The Day – With Some Work…
So, I tried MobileMe. Since the most recent beta, the web mail interface of MobileMe has been able to send and receive emails from a POP3 address, and guess what…. no silly suffixing with “on behalf of mark@me.com”. Brilliant!
There is however one downside: you can only send and receive POP3 email through MobileMe using the web interface at www.me.com. This is because the outgoing server within MobileMe (smtp.mac.com) won’t allow sending from anything other than Apple addresses outside of the web interface….
Ok, so it’s not quite there but it’s the best I’ve found so far….
Finally Setting Up MobileMe To Truly Work With POP3
So what about sending emails from my Mac Mail or iPhone? Well since I was trying to send through Apple’s server with a non Apple address, it didn’t work….
But there is a fix.
Setting Up MobileMe To Send & Receive POP3 Email
- First of all, set up your POP3 email account in the web interface at www.me.com – this sets it up so that the incoming mail is being received (to web & Mac) – no issues with incoming at all
- Head off to Mac Mail and setup a new IMAP email account – it’s important you manually configure this…
- When prompted to enter the email address of the new account, enter “yourname@me.com, yourname@pop3.com” (note your two addresses separated by a comma) – this then allows you to choose which of the two addresses to send any given email from
- Important: use the standard MobileMe incoming server (mail.mac.com)
- Mega important: Use your own outgoing smtp server (smtp.yourdomain.com) which you should have already with your POP account
- Save the new account
Step 6 is integral. It tells the account to send the emails through your own outgoing server, thus eliminating the problem of not being able to send through the Apple servers via any non Apple addresses.
The beauty of this now is that every email you send from either your me.com or yourdomain.com address will be synced to MobileMe, ready to be accessed from anywhere, at anytime.
Not only that, but the recipient sees this email as coming directly from whichever email address you sent it from, no suffixes telling them it’s been routed through MobileMe.
Perfect!
Everything else syncs through MobileMe as normal, calendars, notes, contact et al all remain untouched and work like clockwork.
Setting Up MobileMe to Send & Receive POP3 Emails On The iPhone
We can now apply a similar prinicpal to setting our mail account up on the iPhone.
Note: when you sync your iPhone to the Mac that you’ve just seemingly fixed this issue on, the “yourdomain.com” email address won’t be synced – we need to add this manually.
Setting Up MobileMe To Send & Receive POP3 Email On Your iPhone - Turn Off Mail Syncing In The Native MobileMe Account
Setting up MobileMe to send & receive POP3 emails on your iPhone:
- First of all, set up MobileMe as normal, get it working and syncing your calendars, contacts and anything else you want
- Turn off email syncing in the native MobileMe settings
- Save
- Head off to notes and type out: yourname@me.com, yourname@yourdomain.com
- Copy what you have just typed
- Set up a new IMAP email account on your iPhone and paste the above into the email address field (this field doesn’t allow a comma entry via the keyboard, hence the copying and pasting…)
- Save the account
This will now allow you to send emails from both addresses from your iPhone, without showing that you’re routing the POP3 address through an Apple server.
Nothing else on MobileMe will be affected, everything else will sync just fine and all of your emails will be synced between your iPhone & all of your Macs and the Me.com website.
Perfect #2!
I know that feels a bit messy, but it’s the most elegant way that I have found of setting up MobileMe to send & receive pop3 emails and have it working across all of your Apple hardware and Me.com.
I’ve been running it like this now for a day or so, and it works brilliantly…
Have you tried this? How is it working for you?
Mark wrote this...
Mark is a director at The Design Loft; a marketing studio delivering design, web solutions, SEO, PPC, print, photography and digital marketing directly to SMEs and as white label products to marketing agencies and design houses, all from a base near Sheffield, England. He has consulted and worked on projects for the NHS, UK Ministry of Defence, Barclays PLC, JCB and many more as an experienced web designer, online marketer, IT trainer and casual geek. On top of that he has an affinity for his iPhone and his Mac and loves designing and building pretty websites. He is also a huge advocate of the .NET CMS mojoPortal and is one of the UK's leading mojoPortal skin / mojoPortal theme designers. He has a dog called Pete and is the frontman and bassist for Green Ball Flyers. He also dislikes coconut. Alot.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Mark on June 28, 2010 at 7:56 pm, and is filed under iPhone, Tutorials. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 1 year ago
Bro… I hear ya. I use gmail to manage my business email and the “on behalf of thing” irritates me like having my trombone stolen whilst away at Uni!
Only problem is, I don’t use mobileme…. I will just abandon it when I buy a mac next year but until then I will continue to suffer (y don’t I have on already? AutoCAD won’t run without a partition of the HD and windows on there… which is just rubbish).
Oh.. nice article mind! lol Laters. B
about 1 year ago
Hello dude
Glad you like the article, it’s a real pain isn’t it.
As for the AutoCAD setup, have you considered VMWare Fusion for if / when you grab a Mac? It runs in “Unity” view which means you can run every Windows app on your Mac without having to switch into a Windows “window” and having them all in there. I use it for .Net work as it needs the Windows partition and server running – a similar issue to yours.
Not sure if you’ve come across it already but it could be worth a look for you.
Laters Marko
about 1 year ago
Hi Mark,
Just set up on Mobile Me and want to send emails (iPhone4) under my email alias, via my Pop3 (ISP)…. via Mobile Me!! Is this possible even with your fix?
Have tried setting up as Apple illustrate on MM for fowarding a Pop3 email, but get rejected as a server error at the final hurdle of outgoing email settings. Their alias section is not available for MM trial users so don’t know if that route would bring any success either.
Good post btw,
Cheers, Peter
about 1 year ago
Hi Peter
Glad you like the post first of all.
What you want to achieve is what I needed too, the key things are that you need to set MobileMe up to send and receive your POP email using the preferences within the web interface and not use the forwarding option.
This deals with the send and receipt of your pop mail through MobileMe, albeit just the web interface, and just the receipt of the POP mail on your non web interface apps (Mac Mail or iPhone Mail)n- not the sending part – this is where you hit the barrier.
The important part when trying to get your mail client (Mac Mail or iPhone Mail) to actually send and more importantly, sync, POP mail via MobileMe is to set up the outgoing server in the mail client to use your ISP’s outgoing server rather than Apple’s.
This removes the problem of sending a non Me.com address mail through the Apple servers, however because you’ve set MobileMe web preferences up to handle the send / receive of your POP mail, the messages are still fully synced across your devices; even the mail sent from Mac Mail / iPhone Mail via your POP address using the ISP’s outgoing mail server.
To summarise:
Set up MM to send and receive your POP mail via the MM web interface, don’t use mail forwarding.
Configure your MM mail on the Mac or iPhone using Apple incoming servers and your own ISP’s outgoing server.
When setting up your Mac Mail or iPhone Mail client you only need to set one account up to send / receive your Me.com AND your POP email, just separate your Me.com addy from your POP addy using a comma in the “Email Address” field and you’ll be able to choose which address to send emails from.
I hope that helps, let me know how you get on :0)
Best Mark
about 1 year ago
Hi Mark…UPDATE….
Got further than before, set up pop within MM -thought all was good to go but when i tried sending through alias addy on Apple mail was told the server didn’t allow relaying and message left in outbox ;(
Will keep on it.
Peter
about 1 year ago
Hi Peter
When you say alias addy do you mean a MobileMe alias or your POP addy as an “alias”?
Mark
about 1 year ago
Hi Peter – how did you get on with this in the end? Did you get it working ok?
Best Mark