After many many years of fighting with email, I think I have a usable solution.

I have 5 email addresses that I want to check regularly – no instantly. I want them to show up in all my email clients, in sync, and immediately. Is that asking too much? Until today, yes.

Today I learned that Gmail – my email hub – has activated its own brand of “push” technology on the iPhone. Yes, it uses the Microsoft Active Sync and if you have an Exchange account already set up you must choose one or the other, however, for me, it works.

So here’s the set up that keeps me in email bliss:

I set up my (pop) email accounts to automatically forward a copy of all incoming messages to my Gmail account. Gmail instantly grabs the message and pushes it to my iPhone and of course displays it on the web. Gmail is smart enough to show me the original address the message was sent to, and allows me to reply from that address, or choose a different one. It’s fantastic.

The geeks out there are saying, but what about all that mail piling up on your POP3 server. Well, I’m glad you asked. I set up Apple Mail with all my POP3 accounts. I use that to download all the POP3 mail locally so the server isn’t stuck with all those messages. I can hear you asking, “Who wants to remember to run Mail every so often to clear your POP3 servers?” so I came up with a solution. I wrote an Applescript that opens mail, waits 30 seconds for mail to download, marks it all as read, then closes. I then set up a weekly iCal event and used the alarm feature to run the Applescript.

Finally… instant mail on any computer with an internet connection and my iPhone…. Ahhhhh