How to setup email on the iPhone – Access Gmail on iPhone

Posted on December 22, 2007 at 7:01 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Apple iPhone & iPod Tips series!

How to add more sources to iPhone and iPod Touch installer apps
How to add videos, songs, and photos to an iPod
How to setup email on the iPhone – Access Gmail on iPhone
Get the iPhone interface on your BlackBerry using bPhone
Five cool games you can play on your Apple iPhone

Since everybody’s got an iPhone now, I’ve been asked by a couple of people on how they can setup their iPhones so that they can read their emails from Gmail and Hotmail quickly, easily, and without having to go through the tiny Internet browser (Safari). The cool thing about the iPhone is that you can use it’s built-in Mail feature to access your Gmail email via IMAP!

Recently Google announced that Gmail would be supporting the IMAP interface, which means Gmail can be accessed from thousands of devices such as mobile phones, PDA’s, etc instead of just through POP3 (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc). I’ll write out the steps you have to perform to access Gmail on your iPhone using both IMAP and POP3.

Access Gmail on iPhone via IMAP

First, on the iPhone interface, tap the Settings button from the Home screen.

Then click on Mail, and click on Add Account under the Accounts section. Choose Other and then choose IMAP.

You may see when you click on Mail that there are chooses already there, one of which is Gmail! So why not simply choose that? You can do it that way and this method is how you would set it up using POP. Using IMAP though, you will get the messages in a different format that is more readable on the iPhone.

If you do it the normal way (POP) by clicking on GMail from the Mail section, your email messages when viewed on the iPhone will look like this:

As you can see, everything is pretty tiny still because it includes all of ads on the right side, etc. It’s basically like reading the email by going to Safari and logging to Gmail from there. If you want the emails to look nicer when viewed on the iPhone, access it using IMAP the way I’m describing.

Enter your name under Name, the full Gmail address, and a description for the account. For Incoming Mail Server, go ahead and type in imap.gmail.com and your username@gmail.com for User Name and your password. For SMTP Outgoing mail server, enter smtp.gmail.com and type in the same username and password information there also.

Next click on the Advanced button and select On the Server | Gmail/Drafts, Deleted Messages under Sent Mailbox, and Gmail/Trash under Deleted Mailbox. Also make sure Incoming Uses SSL is ON and Outgoing Uses SSL is On. Finally, check Password under Authentication and click Save.

To access Gmail on the iPhone using POP, just click on Gmail after you click on Mail from the home menu. Enter in the login information and you’ll be done! But again, it’s better to setup Gmail on the iPhone using IMAP because it also supports features like threads and can be viewed much better.

Any questions, post a comment and I’ll see if I can help! Enjoy!

[tags]apple iphone, gmail on iphone, access gmail on iphone, setup email on iphone, how to setup email on iphone[/tags]

» Filed Under Computer Tips

Comments

15 Responses to “How to setup email on the iPhone – Access Gmail on iPhone”

Helen Mul said on : January 1st, 2008 at 9:40 am

Hey,
it says the advanced button, but where it this button?
cheers

richie rusky said on : January 30th, 2008 at 2:00 am

how do i setup my mail feature with yahoo mail?

Winnie said on : February 17th, 2008 at 7:11 pm

i tried to setup my hotmail account but connot!! any tips??

helene brotman said on : March 2nd, 2008 at 2:44 pm

I have same question as helen mul….
insrtuctions say “click on the advanced button” Where is it?

Yumi said on : August 18th, 2008 at 2:20 am

Hello, and thanks for your help! I did everything perfectly, until I came to the following:

“Next click on the Advanced button and select On the Server | Gmail/Drafts, Deleted Messages under Sent Mailbox, and Gmail/Trash under Deleted Mailbox. Also make sure Incoming Uses SSL is ON and Outgoing Uses SSL is On. Finally, check Password under Authentication and click Save.”

I’m very confused as to what you mean by this…also…what is the purpose of this step? Thank you very much!

-Yumi

jzyroff said on : August 31st, 2008 at 3:01 am

I have successfully set up my yahoo email account. Only problem is I have over a thousand messages in my inbox and Yahoo mail retrieves from somewhere in the middle of my list. How do I get them to retrieve only my MOST RECENT 25 messages?

Farzad said on : September 17th, 2008 at 10:02 am

How do one configure the email in iphone to return to inbox after reading an email instead of opening the next email?

Ami said on : October 9th, 2008 at 10:46 am

hey! This helped me so much thankx!

Junior said on : February 2nd, 2009 at 6:05 pm

How can you watch a video attatchment from an email on the iPhone?? Pictures are no problem. Videos are non selectable..

beaner said on : February 11th, 2009 at 7:07 pm

have jailbroken iphone…running tmobile…trying to set up a way to have my emails forwarded to the phone.

actually talked to tmobile about it and they put me in touch with a tech who works there and owns an iphone…he said it shouldn’t be a problem…but he didn’t exactly walk me through it.

apparently it can take up to 48 hours for the “tmobile smartphone dataplan” to fully activate…so I’m guessing that wifi will have to be up and running before I configure the imap dealy…yes?

also…any tips on getting apps from itunes…or just downloading stuff in general would be a great help

thanks all

Portable Air Conditioners.net said on : February 17th, 2009 at 7:07 pm

I use Gmail on my iphone 3g..and it always worked fine, until all of a sudden it stopped working. It would not update my email and just kept say “connecting….” and then “cannot connect to imap.google.com”. It was so frustrating! I tried several things, none of which worked.

Finally I got a tip from someone online to just go into gmail on my computer and change my password to something more secure. Up until then my password had just been a simple word, but after changing it to something with a number and longer word in it, gmail worked on my phone again. But gosh it was so frustrating when it wasn’t working.

ray said on : October 16th, 2009 at 9:47 am

Hello,

Im trying to connect my iphone with my school email address. It goes through gmail, but I have to change my password every three months. Now that I have had to change my password I can still receive but not send messages. Do you know how to fix this? I’ve tried to reset my password on my phone and even tried deleting the email account from my phone and re setting it up and nothing seems to be working.

Fan said on : November 29th, 2009 at 12:39 pm

I can receive the e-mails from GMAIL. Thanks a lot! But I can’t send emails.

Error message as follow:

Cannot Send Mail. The connection to the outgoing server “smtp.gmail.com” failed.

Please help!

Carrie said on : January 28th, 2010 at 1:25 pm

I personally have setup email on my iPhone using the Exchange option since I don’t need it for office email. The Exchange option is much better because it syncs contacts, email, and your Google calendar also.

Here are the instructions for setting up syncing on the iPhone:

http://www.google.com/support/.....opic=14252

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October 27th, 2008 at 5:24 am