I got a MobileMe account to (a) keep my laptop, desktop and iPhone in sync, and (b) get Push email. I did NOT need or want another email address; I have a business email account I need to use, and that is what I wanted to continue to use and (more importantly) for my clients to see and reply to.
This works fine on Outlook, just set your reply email in Mail Settings, More Settings Reply To email address.
A MobileMe alias is no use to me, they all end in @me.com. And I dont want more than one Email Account to check. I have struggled for two days to make this work for emails sent from my iPhone, including going to the London Apple Store and consulting a Genius the official Apple position, it cant be done.
It can. Its a pain; but it can you can set up MobileMe to use any email address as a 'push' email on the iPhone. So I thought Id post this solution for others that might want to do it.
The first thing you need to do is set your non-MobileMe email address to auto-forward to your MobileMe account.
Then create a new (or amend your existing) normal MobileMe Mail account on your iPhone as usual, then leaving the Contacts and Calendar (& Bookmark if you like) sync settings ON turn the turn the Mail sync to OFF. You have to do this because only a properly setup MobileMe Mail account will sync Contacts/Calendar/Bookmarks but you wont use it for email. In fact it wont even show up in your Mail Account list.
Then create ANOTHER email account on your iPhone, and make sure you set this one up as an Other Account (NOT as a MobileMe account), selecting IMAP as the type of account. Enter your name as normal and in the Address field enter the Reply To email address: this is the email address that will show in your recipients emails as the "From" email, even though you're using your MobileMe account.
For your mail server settings, use your MobileMe settings:
Incoming settings:
o Host Name: mail.me.com
o User Name: MobileMe username
o Password: MobileMe password
Outgoing Settings (for the moment enter this):
o Host Name: smtp.me.com
o User Name: MobileMe username
o Password: MobileMe password
Advanced:
o Use SSL On
o Authentication Password
o Server Port 587
This set up wont work yet; if you try and send an email youll get an error message telling you that the smtp.me.com server cannot be reached; but I found it would effectively let me change the outgoing SMTP server after setup.
So now go to into the Mail settings for the new account and scroll down to and select Outgoing Mail Server. Select the Primary Server entry (currently set to smtp.me.com, and turn it OFF. Depending on your setup and how you have synced you might have a number of other handy SMTP servers in the Other SMTP Servers list try one of them. If none of them work, and you can select more than one, or you dont have any you may have to set up another SMTP account with e.g. AuthSMTP.
Now you are able to receive 'push' email from your non-MobileMe account, and reply without visibly using the @me.com address.