Assorted Afflatuses
What $500 Buys
Are They Yahoo?Why is my email unavailable on my actual computer?
With so many advantages, then, I figured I would take Yahoo! up on their offer. I signed up for a mail account, found a suitable user name and input the settings into my iPhone to start receiving the push IMAP goodness. Remarkably, the whole shebang sang. The second an email was sent to my new Yahoo! address the iPhone leapt to life and immediately informed me that I had a new email to read.
But when it came time to setup my computer the experience dove like the Dow, sinking from peachy to painful in a matter of seconds. I opened Mail on my laptop, pulled up the preferences and entered the appropriate settings. Unlike my iPhone, my MacBook Pro refused to cooperate, claiming that the server could not be found. So I tried again. Zilch.
I next turned to Google, hoping to find an answer. After five minutes of sleuthing I discovered that the iPhone uses a non-standard method of communicating with the Yahoo! servers that permits the iPhone — and no other devices — to access push IMAP email on their servers.
For $500 — in addition to the extra $20 I now pay to AT&T — I cannot have access to my Yahoo! email on my laptop with OS X Mail. I can live without custom ringtones and the sometimes molasses-like speeds of AT&T's EDGE data network. Locking my desktop email client out of my email, however, is something that I cannot tolerate, especially at that price.
Why not try setting up an email forwarding service, that forwards all mail from a diffrent email account to the yahoo account? Sure it's less than ideal, but at least you could reap the benifits of push IMAP and still have access to your email on your desktop.
That is a noble idea, however, an idea with its own foibles. The real beauty of IMAP email (aside from the whole "push" aspect) is the fact that it stores everything on the web server, which keeps everything synchronized. So, if I read a message on my phone, it comes up as read on my computer. Or, if I delete message on my computer, it disappears from the email program on my phone. Forwarding, for instance, to my Gmail account, would force me to delete, read and sort messages once on my phone and once on my computer.
I know this is a sort of old post, but I don't see the disadvantage to just using gmail. I find it hard to believe that there is not already a gmail notifier out there for the iphone, or if not, there will be soon. so that takes care of the finding out as soon as you get an email, and anything you do in gmail on the iphone will of course be done when you get home as well, since it is all web-based.