“Send As” for iPhone service

Submitted by danorton on Tue, 07/06/2010 - 11:31

I recently learned of a limitation of the iPhone in that it won’t let you select the “Send As” or “From” address of an email that you reply to, and I’m considering providing a service that will provide a solution to overcome this limitation.

UPDATE: Although my plan will definitely solve the problem, I’m also looking to see if there’s already a solution out there so that I don’t reinvent the wheel. Some have found this to solve the problem for them:

Google Sync: Set Up Your Apple Device for Google Sync.

You set up your iPhone so that it only pulls email from the Gmail account and you only use that account for reading email. You also set up the other email accounts, but you set their retrieval to “manual” so that everything comes in through the Gmail account.

Otherwise…

Many iPhone users are also Gmail users and they forward all their email from various sources to Gmail. This is fine within Gmail, because Gmail allows you to “Send As” any address that you have configured. You can also configure Gmail to reply to an email using the “To” address of the email you’re replying to. For example, if you forward all email from your work email address info@worldsbestwidgets.com to your Gmail address sherlock1863@gmail.com, you can read email from your Gmail mailbox, and when you reply to anything sent to info@worldsbestwidgets.com, it won’t be sent as from sherlock1863@gmail.com, but rather as from info@worldsbestwidgets.com.

The iPhone won’t let you do this.

The solution would involve forwarding a copy of all of your email to the “Send As for iPhone” service. Instead of connecting to Gmail, you would connect to the new SA4iP service to collect and send your email, and your iPhone would automatically “Send As” the email address that received the original email.

At this point, I’m only considering providing the service and am currently polling to see if there’s enough interest to offer it at an attractive price.

If you’re interested, please leave a comment below.

Thanks!

Puny™ URL to this article:
http://skwz.me/sa4ip

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Comments

iphone

Submitted by Kurt (not verified) on Tue, 07/06/2010 - 16:03.

Dan

As one who is about to take the iphone plunge (we have windows mobile now), I was wondering, on windows mobile I can attach to email from mutiple accounts, so I can be reading emailf rom my work exchange server, seperate from my gmail. We are forbidden to forward work email anyplace. So... I was assuming htat hte iphone would allow the same, else I may have issues....

New phones due in a few weeks, I will let you know...

Kurt

Push vs. pull

Submitted by danorton on Tue, 07/06/2010 - 16:52.

I suppose it depends on their wording, but whether you’re “pushing” via forwarding or “pulling” via POP3/IMAP, it would be hard to argue that there’s any practical difference. The service I’m imagining you would configure this way:

Email Address	Source type	Server
	Forward POP3 IMAP
	Forward POP3 IMAP
	Forward POP3 IMAP
	Forward POP3 IMAP

With the “Forward” setting, you would forward email to the SA4iP server, and with the “POP” and “IMAP” settings, the SA4iP server would poll the specified server. You would then get all your email from the SA4iP server either via POP or IMAP, but you’d get one account for each email address you configure, four in this example. The server would split the email into the different email boxes for you, and your iPhone would simply use that account and its associated email address when replying.

Difference

Submitted by Kurt (not verified) on Tue, 07/06/2010 - 19:41.

Dan

Actually, when you attach to the corp exchange server they push a policy that 1) requires a pin on the phone that you have to enter after 20 mins of nonuse 2) 10 wrong attempts (including the phones internal attempts sometimes, sigh) and the phone wipes all of your data, including reformatting the sdcard. 3) the ability to wipe your phone remotely by command from the email system

I kid you not

Anyway, I will let you know when I know more about the iphone, right now I know very little. (they do require a similar policy for the iphone).