xmz - Xavier Muñiz’s weblog |

Good things you will get with this solution:

• The email sent to your main email address (using your own domain, not me.com) automatically pushed to your iPhone via MobileMe.
• The email sent from your iPhone (using the MobileMe account) delivered from your main email address (your own domain, not me.com).
• Additional benefit: Your email, address book and calendars via web on the same place (the MobileMe web application).
• You won’t need an account hosted on an Exchange Server, the only other alternative for iPhone push email with your own domain.

The bad:

• All the email sent from the MobileMe web application will be addressed from your MobileMe email (me.com, not your own domain). This is not a problem if you always send mail from your computer or your iPhone.
• All your mail sent from the iPhone will have a Sender header; in some mail clients, that makes an “on behalf of” appendix to the From header.

What will you need:

• MobileMe account (this does the push-email magic).
• Gmail or Google Applications for domains account (will be used as a gateway to send email).
• Your main email account on your own domain. This is optional; you won’t need it if your Gmail is your main email account (typical case for Google Apps).
• iPhone with 2.0 operating system (as 3G).

First: Configure your email accounts on the iPhone

1. Configure your MobileMe account on the iPhone.
2. Edit your recently created MobileMe account; open the Settings application, and go to Mail, Contacts, Calendars / your MobileMe account (usually named MobileMe) / Account info / SMTP (in the Outgoing mail server section) / Add server…
3. Enter smtp.gmail.com as hostname, and specify your full Gmail address as username, and your Gmail password.
4. Touch Save, and go back to the SMTP screen.
5. Set the primary server (smtp.me.com) to Off.
6. Set the newly created server (smtp.gmail.com, it appears in Other SMTP servers) to On.
7. Now you can exit the Settings application and go back to your iPhone’s main screen.

Second: Configure your Gmail account

1. Login to your Gmail account, and go to Settings / Forwarding and POP-IMAP.
2. In the Forwarding section, enable Forward a copy of incoming mail to, and specify your MobileMe email address (your_username@me.com).
3. In the IMAP Access section, enable IMAP and save your changes.
4. If your Gmail account is not in your own domain (you have another email account), you also will need to follow these steps:
   1. In your Gmail account, go to Settings / Accounts.
   2. Configure your other email account; click Add another email address, and provide your full name and your main email address. Click Next step and then click Send verification.
   3. Gmail will send you a verification email to your main email address; wait for it and follow the instructions to verify it.
   4. When you are done with verification, return to your Gmail account, Settings / Accounts and click the Make default link next to your main email address.
   5. Configure your main email address to forward all your mail to your Gmail account (this is a different process for each email provider; consult with your mail administrator if you have no idea about how to do it).
5. Save your changes, and exit Gmail.

How it works

• When somebody sends you an email to your main email address, it is forwarded to Gmail and then to your MobileMe account. MobileMe pushes the email to your iPhone.
• When you send mail using Gmail’s SMTP server, you need to authenticate using your Gmail account. If your message comes from an address distinct to the address registered with Gmail, it will be replaced with the Gmail address in the From header, and the original address of the message (the one with me.com) will be placed in a special Sender header.

Enjoy.

Via Mac OS X Hints.

Hold on, this can be tricky if you use Google’s Jabber service (aka Google Talk) and don’t want to corrupt your Google Talk buddy list and complete address book in one single step.

Apparently, both lists are linked very closely in Google, so the first sync can be disappointing (and more than just that).

If you aren’t an address book freak, you are already on the safe side (not my case).

Via Håvard Sørbø.

Update: Mac OS X Hints has published a hint on this theme.

Sweet. You will need the 10.5.3 update.

Via Official Google Mac Blog

Update: Be careful; read on.