Configuring a GMail Hosted email account on your iPhone

Note:@see Google Apps if you don't know what I mean by "Google Hosted" -- if your email address ends in gmail.com, then this article doesn't apply to you.

The problems I faced were two-fold. One, if you try to setup a standard GMail account using the iPhone's GMail setup process, it forces you to use the gmail.com domain, which doesn't work with a GMail Hosted account. The second problem is that if you try to setup a mail account using the "Other" option, it won't save the settings because you can't specify the ports for the pop/smtp servers in the account setup screen.

Here's what I did to work around these obstacles.
  1. Create a new POP email account that IS NOT a GMail hosted account. Something that uses the standard pop/smtp ports, etc.
  2. Go to Settings>Mail>Accounts and select the account that you just setup.
  3. Change the Address field to your hosted gmail account.
  4. Change the POP server to pop.gmail.com, and change your POP user/password to your GMail hosted email address and password.
  5. Change the SMTP server to smtp.gmail.com, and change your SMTP user/password to your GMail hosted email address and password.
  6. Click the "Advanced" button and make sure the "Incoming Uses SSL" and "Outgoing Uses SSL". Also make sure that "Authentication" is set to "Password".
  7. There is no "Save" button, so if you click the blue button in the upper-left corner with your mailbox name in it, it will return to the account settings page. Then click the blue "Mail" button in the upper-left to return to your mail box. Then you should be able to sync.
Also - Make sure you have your GMail Hosted email account setup for POP access. Just Google "How do I enable POP?" to find out how to do that.

Good luck, Matt
Copyright 2006 Streamlined Technology, LLC