.mac and iPhone mail experiences?

[ndriver182]

I've currently got a new gmail account, my older SBC global e-mail and a brand new AOL address that I was hoping to somehow rig up with my phone so that I could more accurately "sync" up my e-mails between my phone and apple mail. I should point out that I don't mean "sync" in the sense of an exchange server, but in the sense of if I open an e-mail on my phone it doesn't show up in my apple mail or vice versa. Of course like everybody else I'm having issues.

The one thing I haven't heard much about is how .mac accounts interact with the phone. Probably because most people don't want to pay for it. I'm curious though, do .mac accounts act as exchange accounts or do people have the same problems with .mac that people with gmail, yahoo, aim and even their local ISP e-mail accounts have?

I'm really loving my phone, but something about this e-mail thing just keeps me looking for a better solution even though until now I've never even had e-mail on my phone.

 

[jlanuez]

I use (yes,and pay for) two .mac accounts and they are working perfectly with all 3 macs I use. Email read on one shows up as "read" on the others, an email that is deleted on one is automatically gone from the others, etc...

Everything is saved in common sent and "draft" boxes. I can start an email on one, save it to my "draft" folder , then access it from any of my macs or iPhone.

 

[FreeState]

I also have a .mac account I use. It works great.

The only problem I have with it is that on the iPhone you can not set the reply to address to anything other than your .mac email address. You can however do this on a Mac in Mail. I emailed Apple's .Mac and they sent it to the iPhone department so hopefully they will change this in the future.

(For instance if someone emails me at jeff@someurl.com it gets forwarded to myaccount@mac.com and if I hit reply on the iPhone they will get an email from myaccount@mac.com, not from the email address they used.)

 

[ndriver182]

I was just looking at the .mac website. Sounds pretty cool. I do have one question though, but not sure if anybody can shed some light on it. At home I use my MBP and I obviously have my iPhone with me at all times. So having the .mac account wouldn't be a problem for those devices. The info on the .mac web page says it's also compatible with PCs, but I couldn't really seem to find any information on this. I've got a Dell laptop running XP at work that I have Outlook to check my personal mail and it would be nice to have access to the iDisk in case I have to drop some files on there so I can work on them from home, etc. Anybody know how this works? I don't doubt that it works since the website videos says it does... I just am curious how before I go setting one up.

 

[dukeblue91]

Yes they have iDisk for windows too, and I think you can sync that PC also.

 

[speedballs]

I love .mac on my iPhone. I tried to use a gmail account but I'd was so funky I just bookmarked mobile gmail for fast access. .mac on the other hand works so so well. I love it.

 

[earnjam]

for those of you who don't understand why .mac is working better than gmail, here is a short explanation.

.mac uses IMAP. When you mark an email as "read", it then marks that email on the server as being read. if you delete it, it deletes it on the server.

gmail right now only uses POP. In POP access, when you use a mail application to check your mail (outlook, apple mail, your iphone) it pulls a copy of the message from the server. When you read it, it only marks it as read in the location you checked it. If you say, check it on your iPhone and then delete a message. It only deletes it on the iPhone. When you go back to your computer, it could still be on there marked as unread. You can adjust settings to delete messages from the server after they have been popped, but then you would only have a copy on whatever machine you checked it on.

That's why IMAP is clearly better when using email over multiple devices. If you're only checking from one place, POP isn't bad. Hopefully gmail will implement IMAP soon. Push IMAP would be nice for .mac too.

 

[jwa276]

I just signed up for a .mac account specifically for email integration with my iPhone... Needless to say... I love it!

I have my business gmail account forwarding to my .mac, and I set up a yahoo account to forward my old school email that is overloaded with spam as it is my junk email / signup address.

Loving IMAP on the iPhone.. It is beauteous

 

[DiamondMac]

.Mac email works perfectly

I also have a GMail, AOL, and School email on there.