MobileMe service

[HarryT]

I've been reading about the "MobileMe" service, and have a question which perhaps someone can answer. On Apple's site it says:

When you join MobileMe, you get a me.com email account that’s always up to date. New messages are pushed to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch automatically, and you’re notified the instant they arrive. MobileMe constantly checks for new messages, so you don’t have to.

When it says "MobileMe constantly checks for new messages", does this refer only to mail sent to the "me.com" address? Is it possible to configure MobileMe to download mail from a POP3 account and then push it to the mobile device?

[scottjl]

No, they are basically referring to the push capability of apple's me.com service. mobileme can't pull mail from other accounts, but you could forward from another service to your me.com account.

if you happen to have a free yahoo account, you can use it with push mail service as well, and yahoo does have the ability to pull from other accounts too i believe.

i thought i remembered gmail having some sort of push ability too if you set up with exchange.

push service is a serious drain on the battery.

[Trubu]

Originally Posted by scottjl

No, they are basically referring to the push capability of apple's me.com service. mobileme can't pull mail from other accounts, but you could forward from another service to your me.com account.

If you do set up your other email to forward to MobileMe, it effectively gives you push service for all of your mail accounts, which is nice. Also, they just updated MM so you can reply using the external address instead of the @me.com one, which was the big missing piece in trying to use MM to handle all of your mail.

I have all of my various accounts set up to forward, though I use an Exchange account instead of MM email for that purpose.

[HarryT]

Thanks for the information.

[Daddy Warpig]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Is it possible to configure MobileMe to download mail from a POP3 account and then push it to the mobile device?

Yes, you can. From the MobileMe help pages:

You can use MobileMe Mail to check a separate POP email account in addition to your MobileMe Mail account. This means that your email messages from these accounts are delivered to MobileMe Mail.

Not IMAP, but POP3 only. POP3 is not a syncing protocol: you get messages from a server and anything you do locally isn't synced back to that server.

So, if you get your GMail through POP3, MobileMe will fetch it and put it into your inbox. If you delete one of these, it will not be deleted from the GMail system.

As of 4 days ago, when using the HTTP interface, MobileMe can now send using GMail's SMTP servers. This means when you reply to a message that was originally sent to your GMail account, the reply will get sent from GMail. Again, only via the web interface, not Mail on the iPad/iPhone.

Caveat: You've been able to do this for a few years now (AFAIK), but I've never gotten GMail to work properly. Not sure why.

Instead, I have GMail forward my messages to MobileMe (as suggested above). It's effectively the exact same setup, but less of a PITA to set up.