The Info:

Everyone loves how Apple has finally added push notifications to the iPhone/iTouch 3.0 OS. It took Apple forever to do it, but they finally did. Now the main thing that is missing is push email. While Yahoo claims to support push email, I’ve found that its not real push email, but IMAP email, which is not anywhere close. Unfortunately, at the moment, the only way to get true push email on the iPhone or iTouch is to have a MobileMe account. Here’s how you can set up a MobileMe account, with a free 60-day trial, to receive email from you old provider and push it to you on your iPhone. (There are instructions on how to sync MobileMe with Mac OS X below. I will try to add directions to sync with Windows as soon as I get a chance to log into Windows.)

The Requirements:

1. An iPhone or iTouch
2. A credit card or debit card (You won’t actually get charged. Read step 5 for more info.)

The Process:

1. First, go to http://me.com
2. You should see under the login blanks, some small text that says, “sign up for  a free trial”. Click that.
3. Enter your desired user information.
4. Click “Continue”.
5. Enter your valid billing information. Don’t worry, Apple won’t actually charge your anything at first. Apple only requires this so that, should you decide to continue using MobileMe, your account won’t be temporarily frozen at the end of the 60-day free trial. If you don’t want to buy the full MobileMe account at the end of the 60-day trial, be sure to cancel your account before the trail is up or else you will be charged.
6. Click “Sign Up”.
7. You will see a page that says something like “Authorizing Credit Card…”.
8. Once this page goes away, you should be able to access your new MobileMe email.
9. To set up MobileMe on a Mac, do this:
   1. Go to System Preferences -> MobileMe.
   2. Enter you new MobileMe info. If your email is “example@me.com”, your username will be “example”.
   3. Click “Sync”.
   4. Click the check box next to “Synchronize with MobileMe:” and change the drop down box to say “Automatically”.
   5. Click the check box next to each thing you want to synchronize with your MobileMe account. You need to check “Contacts”, “Calendars”, and “Bookmarks” if you want those to be synced to your iPhone or iTouch.
   6. Click “Sync Now” to begin syncing.
10. Go to your previous email provider’s website and set it to forward your email to your new MobileMe email account.
11. If you use Gmail, here’s how forward your mail to MobileMe:
    1. Go to http://gmail.com.
    2. Click on “Settings” in the upper-right corner of the window.
    3. Click on “Forwarding and POP/IMAP“.
    4. Click the bubble next to “Forward a copy of incoming mail to” and type in your MobileMe email address next to that.
    5. Click “Save Settings”.
12. Now to set up MobileMe on your iPhone/iTouch
    
    1. Open up the Settings app on your iPhone or iTouch.
    2. Tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”.
    3. Tap “Add Account…” (If you’ve never added an email account on your iPhone/iTouch before, skip step 14).
    4. Tap “MobileMe”.
    5. Enter your Name, Email Address, Password, and a Description (usually your email address).
    6. Click “Save” in the upper-right corner.
    7. Choose what you want to have synced.
    8. Close the program now.
    9. Hit the back button so you get back to the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” section.
    10. Tap “Fetch New Data” and make sure “Push” in turned on.
    11. Scroll down and tap “Default Account”.
    12. Tap whichever account you want to be the default account for when you send new messages. (I chose my Gmail account).
    13. Hit the back button which will probably say “Mail…”.
    14. If you have a previous email address that you don’t want to receive mail from anymore (so you don’t get duplicate messages), tap the account name and toggle the “Account” to “off”.
    15. If you want to reply to an email with your previous email address, follow the next part of the guide.
        1. Tap on your MobileMe account in the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” section of the Settings app.
        2. Tap “Account Info”.
        3. Tap “SMTP” under the “Outgoing Mail Server”.
        4. Tap the “smtp.me.com” under “Primary Server”.
        5. Toggle the “Server” to “off”.
        6. Tap the back button, which says “SMTP”.
        7. If the server you want to send mail from is listed under “Other SMTP Servers”, then tap it and toggle “Server” to “On”.
        8. If the server is not listed, tap “Add Server…”.
        9. Enter the “Host Name”, User Name” and “password”.
        10. Tap “Save”
        11. The server should now be in the list with its “Host Name” visible. Tap it.
        12. Make sure “Server” is toggled to “On”.
        13. Press the home button to exit the Settings app.

As long as you don’t have the MobileMe website open on your computer, any email sent to your previous email or your new MobileMe address should now me automatically and nearly instantaneously pushed to your iPhone. If you set it up to send mail from a different server, you should also be able to reply to any email pushed to your iPhone from your old email address. If you have any problems or can’t figure out something about this guide, leave a comment below.