I am fairly committed to using Gmail (Google Mail) as my primary universal email service, but once I got my new iPhone I found myself wishing that it too provided ‘push’ services like Yahoo Mail provides (as does Microsoft Exchange server and Apple’s new MobileMe service).
The simplest way is to set up a free Yahoo mail account (assuming you don’t have one already), add the Yahoo Mail account to your iPhone’s email account list, then in Gmail create a new filter which tests for the condition ‘is:inbox’ and then forwards a copy to Yahoo Mail – which (you guessed it) gets pushed automatically to the iPhone.
If you haven’t set up a filter before, log into Gmail and click on ‘Settings’ in the navigation towards the upper right corner of the page. Then click on the ‘Filters’ tab (between ‘Labels’ and ‘Forwardingand POP/IMAP’). Then at the bottom of this page click ‘Create a new filter’.
On the first page of your filter setup type the words “is:inbox” (without quotes) in the field ‘Has the words:’, then click on the ‘Test Search’ button. You should see the result is everything currently in your inbox.
Then click the ‘Next Step >>’ button, which will give you a warning to the effect this criteria will never catch incoming mail — but it does!
The last step is to select ‘Forward it to:’ and fill in your Yahoo Mail account address. Then select ‘Create Filter’. I would advise against selecting the tickbox to ‘Apply this filter to nnn conversations below’, otherwise – your iPhone will have nnn unread email conversations to deal with.
<img src=“/images/yahoo_mail_1.gif” width=450 height=209 alt=“Google Mail filter creation dialogue”/>
Finally, add the Yahoo Mail account to your iPhone’s email account list. You may also wish to alter your iPhone’s email fetching preferences so that Gmail will only be checked when you want to check it (Manual). Go into the iPhone’s settings and select ‘Fetch New Data’ from the top group. Select ‘Advanced’, then select your gmail account and set it to ‘Manual’ (instead of ‘Fetch’).
Actually, you don’t have to keep Gmail on your iPhone, but I do so I can override the ‘From:’ address to my Gmail account when I am responding to an email I am viewing in my Yahoo account. It makes it easier for the person who originally sent the email – otherwise you could end up with a situation where a ‘reply all’ ends up including both your Gmail account and your Yahoo account and you could potentially start seeing duplicate notifications of the same email, etc.
All that remains now is to test it out by sending an email to your Gmail account and waiting for your iPhone to buzz/alert/notify you of a new mail. Cool!
