How to Setup Your iPhone for imap Mail

Hey There,

Let me mention before trying this change you should save all your email on your computer or other device. You don’t want to lose any important mail. Backup anything you don’t want to lose just in case.

 Do you have multiple devices like your iPhone, Main home computer and maybe a Laptop too where you would like to view your email but then lose it ’cause you couldn’t remember which device you read the email on and it doesn’t show up on the other devices? Chances are you are setup like most people to use pop email accounts.

There is a way to set things up so your mail gets to which ever computer/device you decide to sit down with and it will download to that particular device as well as your others.  If you are like me I want to view my email while at work on my iphone and when I get home I sit at the big screen computer and sometimes I’d forward email from my iphone to myself so I could open it up on the big screen computer or laptop.

I’ve needed a way to make the mail show up on all devices but put off doing so thinking it may cause problems or I’d lose some important mail in doing so. Finally I got up the courage to get this done and I want to share it with you so you don’t have to go thru what I did and not have mail for 4 days on my iPhone.

I’m going to try to keep the process straight forward and please understand that your email provider may be different than the one I am describing but I’ll try to keep it general on what you have to do to make this all work.

1) First you must sign on to your web site host account where you need to get access to your account email settings. An example is using a gmail account. It should be similar for other email clients but you will get an idea of what and where you need to make the changes. While you are signed in look or do search for setting up email accounts. You will need incoming and outgoing server names. For instance gmail is imap.gmail.com for incoming, and smtp.gmail.com for outgoing. Go ahead and write this info down as you will need it for your new iphone settings.This above info is for gmail accounts only, yours will be different if not a gmail account.

2) So you’ve logged in to your account and have found your email settings. There you want to navigate to something that refers to pop/imap settings and also may contain forwarding option as with the gmail account. Click on the forwarding pop/imap setting and then you will get a window showing some options for pop email and imap email. You want to disable the pop setting and enable the imap setting and click save. You want to accomplish the same thing if you have a different email client. Once this is set then you will move on to the next step in the process.

3} Ok now you will need to redo your iphone account email for this same address only this time it needs to be set to receive imap mail and the iPhones default is to set up for clients using pop email. You can leave the existing email account alone and add a new one. Even when it prompts you for say a gmail account in the beginning you don’t choose the gmail logo, you will want to choose "other" and manually set up an account just for imap email.

4) More specific directions. On your iPhone tap Settings, then tap mail ect. Then add account then you must select "Other" at the bottom and don’t select the Gmail logo that is one of the above choices. Then select add mail account. Next will pop up a new window and you must fill in the name of you the user, address as in full email address, the password for this account and in the description, you can pick any nickname you’d like. Click SAVE!

Next window is very important! It will ask you the name of the incoming server host name. Remember you wrote this down earlier when you visited your site hopefully.

Fill in host name exactly like you copied correctly from your site. then fill in your full email address (user name) and password as before. Then click SAVE!

Then you should be taken to a new window. This will read outgoing mail server and this is where you want to enter your email clients outgoing info exactly like you copied. Then proceed to fill in your user name which again is your full email address and password and then don’t forget to click SAVE! Now you can go in and delete the original account which is pop. A new batch of email should be downloaded into your phone and will require a bit of editing. If you could set this up from the beginning it is a lot less work.

Ok, I didn’t say this was exactly a short project but it is well worth it once it’s all done correctly. You will want to email yourself from another account to make sure everything is working.

One more thing, you must go to your other devices ie laptop or big screen main computer and change this account to imap mail too. Usually that requires either editing existing incoming and outgoing servers and saving this change. I would suggest doing one at a time but remember that unless your email program allows you to set an individual in and out going server for that one account you may have trouble sending mail as it may select the pop server as the outgoing server and your email won’t work and you will get confused and frustrated like I did. This mainly applies to more than one email address from the same mail client.

Good luck and remember to save any important email before starting just in case.