One feature that I have often heard people request for the iPhone is the ability to have a unified Mail inbox so that your iPhone can sync with multiple e-mail accounts but have all of the new messages show up in one location. I actually prefer the current system; I have both my work e-mail and my iPhone J.D. e-mail on my iPhone, and I prefer to choose whether I am focusing on work or focusing on this website. Nevertheless, even I agree that it would be nice for Apple would add a unified inbox as an option for those who want it.
In the meantime, San Jose, CA attorney Greg Charles tells me that he has come up with a reasonable workaround. Greg has three POP e-mail accounts, so normally he would have to check each one manually. But instead, he has configured his Gmail account (click Settings at the top of the Gmail screen and then click the Accounts tab) to get mail from all three of his POP accounts. Now, all three of his POP e-mail accounts can be checked in a single Gmail inbox, plus, he gets the benefit of the Gmail spam filters. On his iPhone, he set up a Gmail IMAP account to be handled by the Mail app which lets him use the folders that he set up in Gmail to organize the mail with filters. Greg also tells me that when he responds to an e-mail, the iPhone responds using the e-mail account that received the mail. Kudos to Greg for coming up with the very creative solution, and I hope it gives others some ideas for managing e-mail.
By the way, if you use Gmail with your iPhone, you can certainly set up the Mail app to handle it, but I prefer to just access the Gmail website using Safari on the iPhone. Gmail is formatted for the iPhone screen, and I put a shortcut icon on my Home screen so I can just tap that as if it is a dedicated app to launch into Gmail.
