The first day of September is a big day for Gmail. The Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage and it lasted for about 100 minutes. As many of you like me rely on Gmail to communicate, stay connected and do business. The outage definitely affected millions of users and left Gmail inaccessible for nearly 2 hours.
Ben Treynor, VP Engineering of Google, has explained on Google’s blog why Gmail failed:
At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.
It doesn’t matter you do not understand the root cause. But one point I would like to pinpoint is:
IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.
Yeah! You’re not affected by the incident if you’re connecting Gmail via IMAP or POP. So, what does it mean to you as an iPhone user? I’m not saying IMAP/POP is more reliable than the web interface. I know many of iPhone users are accessing Gmail via mobile Safari. But it seems like it’s always good for us to configure other channels to access Gmail. Just in case the web interface of Gmail fails, you have other means to access our email.
So, here comes the guide that shows you how to configure your iPhone to access Gmail directly via IMAP. By doing all the configurations, you can retrieve emails on your Gmail account right from the Mail application. That shouldn’t be a problem if you still prefer to access Gmail via Safari. Your emails are still there. It just offers an alternative way to check Gmail on iPhone.
Okay, let’s get started.
How to Configure Gmail on iPhone via IMAP
1. Before you can retrieve email via IMAP, make sure you have enabled the IMAP option in your Gmail account. After sign-in Gmail, you can go to “Settings” -> click “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” -> select “Enable IMAP”. Then click “Save Changes” button to effectuate the change.
2. With IMAP configured on your account, now go back to your iPhone.
3. On your iPhone, tap “Settings” -> “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” -> “Add Account”. Then tap “Other”. Remember you should tap “Other” instead of “Gmail”.
4. Tap “Add Mail Account”
5. Key in your name, email address and password. Tap the “Save” button to proceed.
6. Next, you need to fill in the incoming and outgoing server information. For incoming server, please use “image.gmail.com” as the host name and fill in your Gmail address as the user name. (note: remember you need to use the full gmail address for the user name)
7. For the outgoing server, please use “smtp.gmail.com” as the host name and your Gmail address as the user name. Also, key in your Gmail password.
8. Tap “Save” once you have configured the server settings. iPhone then connects to Gmail server and verifies your Gmail account. If everything works well, you’ll see a new account in the Mail settings.
That’s it. Now, you can launch the Mail application and check your Gmail.
Are you affected by Gmail’s outage? Which way are you using to access Gmail? Leave comments and let us know.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks a lot,
Best Regards,
I live in Singapore–my Gmail (provided through Google Apps) was down for over two days. Why is it that my outage was so much longer?
@kevin, the service should be back. I’m also accessing Gmail (via Google Apps) and it’s normal. Are you accessing via web interface or IMAP/POP?
Hey looks like your spell checker got you. 6. Should be “imap.gmail.com”
it correct in the screenshot.
Hey, you have a neat blog. I like the getup!
I am having problems sending Gmail using IMAP on my iPhone 3G, whether it be on wireless, 3G or EDGE. And it started all on a sudden. Everything was fine till this morning when I suddenly started getting the “smtp.gmail.com” failed message. I checked all my settings, deleted and recreated my account following instructions from Google, checked that my username and password are both present in the IMAP and SMTP settings and that the SSL is turned ‘On’. I even tried 25, 465 and 587 as the SMTP ports, but yet, no joy! I still can’t send emails from my iPhone.
Would you or anyone else have any idea about this?