Configure iPhone or iPad for SWCP Email

There are several ways configure your iPhone for email. The following describes the method that works best with SWCP's mail servers.

Use IMAP, not POP

If you will be accessing your mailbox from multiple locations at the same time, IMAP works better than POP. Remember that if your desktop computer is configured to check for mail every 10 minutes, and you are out and about checking mail on your iphone, there will be times when your phone and computer try to hit the mailbox at the same time. IMAP supports this, but POP does not.

iPhone Email Account Setup

• Incoming Mail Server:
  • Host Name: mail.swcp.com
  • User Name: <your user name>
  • Password: <your password>
• Outgoing Mail Server:
  • Host Name: mail.swcp.com
  • User Name: <your user name>
  • Password: <your password>
  • Use SSL: ON
  • Authentication: Password
  • Server Port: 587
• Advanced, Incoming Settings:
  • Use SSL: ON
  • Authentication: Password
  • Server Port: 993
  • IMAP Path Prefix: <leave empty>
• Advanced, Deleted Messages
  • See below for information about this setting

Deleting Messages

Determining how messages will be deleted is important. It's irritating to read email on your iPhone, then go back to the office and have to wade through the same messages. You want to be able to delete messages from the iPhone and have your desktop email program recognize those deletions. This is an area where IMAP is essential. In the "Advanced Settings" for your iPhone mail account, you have these options to affect how messages are deleted:

• "Deleted mailbox" - can be "On My iPhone" or a named folder on the server. If it's "On My iPhone" the deleted messages get copied to a folder named Trash on your phone. DO NOT USE THIS OPTION.

• If "Deleted Mailbox" is set to a folder on the server (e.g. "Deleted Messages") then when you delete a message from any folder it gets COPIED to the "Deleted Messages" folder, *and* marked as "deleted" in the original folder.

When you go into the INBOX or other folders with your desktop client or webmail, the messages you deleted from the iphone will still be visible there, but marked "deleted". If you "Empty Trash" they'll get really deleted from the folder. A copy of them will still be in the "Deleted Messages" folder.

There's one more important setting on the iPhone: the "Remove" setting. It can be "After one day", "week", or "month". This controls how long the iPhone will leave messages in the "Deleted Messages" folder. "1 week" is a good setting. Every time you check mail from the iPhone, it nukes messages older than a week from the "Deleted Messages" folder. If you get a lot of large email attachments and delete from the iPhone, this could be a problem because of the disk space needed for the "Deleted Messages" folder. You could use a shorter period (1 day), or buy more disk space, or just resist the urge to delete those messages from the iphone.

Oh, one more thing: in order to select the "Deleted Messages" folder in the advanced settings, the folder had to be created ahead of time. You can create the folder in webmail, or using the IMAP client on your desktop computer (Thunderbird, mail.app, Outlook, etc.)

The IMAP Folder Problem

The IMAP server keeps a list of your "subscribed" folders. That is, files in your directory which are mail folders. That way most IMAP clients (like Outlook or Thunderbird or RoundCube webmail) know which files in your home directory to display as mail folders, and they ignore the rest. However, the iPhone ignores this subscription list and displays ALL the files it finds. This is irritating for a couple of different reasons, but there doesn't seem to be any fix for it, as of iPhone OS 3.x. Perhaps they'll fix it in 4.0.

For some people this is no big deal. You just see a few extra files and you can mentally ignore them. For others, it's a big problem. For example, if your home directory also has a large web site stored, it might actually prevent the iPhone from being able to function, because it times out waiting for the huge (and useless!) file list to transfer.

Here are a couple of workarounds:

• Only use INBOX - to do this, set Advanced -> Incoming Settings -> IMAP Path Prefix to the word "INBOX" (all capitals, no punctuation). Now when you access mail in this account, it will only show you your INBOX, and not any other IMAP folders that you might have. If you primarily use your phone to look at incoming mail and don't mind waiting until you are at your main computer to file messages into folders, this might work for you. But it means you can't access old messages that you previously filed into folders.
• Put folders in a subdirectory - to do this, create a subdirectory in your home directory on the SWCP server called "mail". In that directory create symbolic links to your folders one level up. Set the IMAP Path Prefix on the iPhone to the word "mail". Now the iPhone will only see those folders. (This won't disturb other IMAP clients you may be using such as Thunderbird, Outlook, or webmail). If you want to do this, please ask help@swcp.com to set it up for you. We'll take care of creating the directory and required links.

See Also

• Using Multiple Identieds in iPhone Mail