Setting the Default Reply-to: address in iPhone Mail.app

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Something that has bothered me about the iPhone from day one was the issue I was having with email. My situation is a standard one, I have a @gmail.com address that I am not willing to stop using for my new @me.com address.

I did however want the @me.com Push feature. So simple enough I setup a forward from my gmail account and things worked. The problems started when I realized I couldn’t set the iPhone to use a default email address, I couldn’t even change it until I added my gmail account to the phone.

This sort of solved the problem; I could now select gmail as a From address though the idea of doing that for every reply was not a fun thought. A secondary problem created by this was that I now received every email twice. Even with the gmail account set to Manual Fetch it still checked it when I whenever I went into the Mail app.

So I would get an @me.com Push alert, then when checking that account,  the gmail account triggers a fetch and I get the email/buzz/tone again before I even got to see it once. Major annoyance and waste of battery.

My next experiment was to try and disable the gmail account but not delete it. This didn’t solve the problem as now  the disabled account is not a From option. Frustrated I was thinking of resorting to archiving all email incoming to my gmail inbox. But then I finally came across the hint of good solution.

The trick is to set the @me.com account to use gmail’s SMTP server. I set this in Account Info for MobileMe. Even better then just utilizing gmail’s SMTP server it can be used even if the gmail account itself is disabled. This solved both the problem of receiving duplicate emails as well as setting a default From address other then @me.com

Note: Once the above is set when replying to or creating emails via your @me.com account  on the phone it will possibly still say From: youraddress@me.com in the gui but because your email will be relayed through smtp.gmail.com the from address your recipient will see is your @gmail.com address.

Simple elegant solution hidden under ninja configuration.

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