How to push GMail to iPhone without Exchange?

This is a great question and I hope that it will get a lot of answers.

(For the sake of this discussion I'll assume by 'push' you mean 'near-instant notification of new messages.' IMAP has something called IMAP IDLE which is similar but I don't think iOS supports it, or maybe Gmail doesn't, or both. Anyway, I don't want that term to become a distraction, I just wanted to make it clear that my working definition of 'push' is "not waiting for Mail.app to check for new messages every X minutes." I'm also not going to get into a debate about whether we "should" or "shouldn't" be "tied to our email" or "overuse quotation marks.")

Here are the solutions that I am aware of:

1. Pay Google: A paid "Google Apps" account will allow you to use ActiveSync.

   • Con: I can't find anything to confirm that you can pay for a Gmail account and get ActiveSync back, so you have to change your email address.
   • Pro: Should work reliably, does not require any 3rd party services.

2. AwayFind: A paid AwayFind account (pricing information available here: http://awayfind.com/plans.php) will let you get push notifications for messages which match certain. You could set this up to alert you to all of your messages, but my guess is that once you use the service, you'd realize that you really only want alerts for some messages.

   • Pro: much better and more granular control over notifications. Works with Gmail or Google Apps (or Exchange, IIRC)
   • Con: 3rd-party service (That's not a 'con' for me… AwayFind uses Google OAuth for login, so you're not giving them your password). I use and recommend their service, but am not otherwise affiliated with them.
3. Boxcar: You can forward some/all of your email to Boxcar. I used them before AwayFind. They had some reliability issues a few months(?) ago, but I've heard that's gotten much better. Haven't used them for awhile. I think the iOS
   • Pro: Low cost. App is free with ads, US$5 to remove ads.
   • Con: Potential reliability issue, and requires you to forward your email to a 3rd party.

1. Use your iCloud email account.
   • Pros: You can forward your gmail to the iCloud account to get push email on the iPhone.
   • Cons: Sent email would originate from the iCloud account and not the gmail account (although I'm not sure if there's a way around that)

– binarybob Mar 27 at 22:45

There is a solution here that will allow that to work, you just need to have the Gmail account setup on the iPhone as well.

1. Go to Gmail web interface, then to Settings -> Forward Account and add your iCloud email to forward all your emails to. I also chose to mark emails forwarded to read, since I don't use the web interface much.

2. Setup Gmail on your iPhone like you normally would (skip if it's already on there). But under Settings, do not have it sync emails.

3. Setup your iCloud account to send using your Gmail address.

   • Setting -> Mail, Contacts, Calendar -> iCloud -> Account -> Advanced Mail -> outgoing mail server -> TURN iCloud SMTP server OFF and turn other SMTP servers on, choosing your smtp.gmail.com settings associated to the appropriate gmail account. HIT DONE.

A few things about this setup... When you go to reply to a message, it will show as if it's sending from your iCloud account, it does not. It is just using the settings you just set that are associated with the iCloud account.

This only works if you don't really use your iCloud account and you only need to reply via one Gmail account. I had several Gmail accounts, but only respond from one, so this is not a big issue for me.