iPhone and IMAP Mail

Prior to the iPhone hit last week I set out to switch to IMAP mail. Before I worked in ITS I was over in the College of IST ... for better of for worse (mostly worse) we were all on an Exchange server. There were problems, but I have to say I had missed the mail functionality since coming over a year and a half ago. I missed having an identical view of my mail no matter where I looked at it. I am not a fan of webmail -- of any sort, not just PSU's -- I am mail client kind of person, so that's never been an option for me.

I had settled on dealing with the situation by only ever checking my mail from one machine -- not something that is all that feasible given the fact I have a few different machines. When the iPhone pilot became a reality I knew I needed to get off POP and onto IMAP. Hence the switch. I have to say, the PSU IMAP service is rocking! My mail is always in sync, I never get the annoying error messages I was getting before, and I can feel confident that if I am away from my MacBook I can grab email. IMAP at PSU carries a small fee, but it isn't all that expensive.

IMAP on the iPhone is the only way to go (IMHO) ... I like to get mail on the go and have its "state" be identical when I get to the desktop. I only wish I had my MailTags plug-in on the iPhone, but you can't have everything. At any rate, email on the iPhone is a pleasure and having my mail synced up with my desktop is wonderful. I am checking and sending more and more mail from my iPhone, so having it all work so nicely is very cool. If you are going to go down the iPhone path, I highly recommend switching to IMAP.

Comments

[Rebecca]

Hey Cole! I am a new faculty member, in from the University of Michigan, where I have an IMAP connection via both my Apple Mail program and my iPhone. Please, please, please tell me that PSU is moving to this intelligent system! And if so, how do I access these things?

And if I can't get the IMAP to work on both of these, I remember hearing something about forwarding through Google to get this functionality, while somehow magically retaining the sender's email address. Do you know anything about that??

I found your post here under a search for "psu imap iphone" or some such thing. Thanks in advance if you have any thoughts.

Cheers,
Rebecca

[Cole Camplese]

We do have IMAP service available here at PSU. Follow this link to get yourself set up:

http://aset.its.psu.edu/accounts/imap.html

And welcome to PSU!

[Andrew]

Hey..I'm having complication syncing my PSU webmail to my iPhone. Can you do that? I switched over to IMAP and its not working out. Saying that the SMTP server does not support authentication.

Help me..
Andrew

[Amanda]

I am having trouble syncing my iPhone as well. I switched to IMAP but i think that my problem is with the incoming server. I list it as webmail.psu.edu. Is that right?

HELP!

Amanda