Gmail users with iphones, ipod touches and ipads have to make trade-offs. they can use gmail and google web-based mobile calendars, they can use google’s fairly limited gmail app, or they can deal with the pain of trying to get gmail and google calendars to work with apple’s built-in apps.
Setting up mail and calendar accounts on an iPad or iPhone isn’t that hard to do. But for Gmail users, it’s trickier than it needs to be. It’s not hard to set up the basic accounts, but features like multiple calendars, “Send Mail As,” contact sync, and server-side deletion of messages take some finagling. Fortunately, after a little bit of setup labor, it’s possible to get completely up and running on Apple’s iOS Mail, Contacts and Calendars with Google as the back end. Here’s what you need to know.
google offers step-by-step instructions for setting up full sync, but in true google fashion, it’s still in beta and there are known issues. after years of experimenting, i found a slightly more complicated setup that, once finished, works better than google’s method. It’s also much more reliable than icloud sync, which I tried. here is my recipe for fully functional gmail and google calendar sync on ios.
If you want to make sure everything goes smoothly, you can first delete all your existing mail and calendar accounts that use your gmail address.
1. configure google sync for your device
this is the part that few people know. There is actually a website that you need to use to activate the full Google Sync capabilities on your iOS device (Blackberry and Windows Phone too). it is located at m.google.com/sync/. on the device you want to sync, go to that address in safari and turn it on.
there are some options there. You can enable ‘send mail as’, so if you use other email addresses from your gmail account, you will be able to use those aliases on ios as well. you can actually add send as aliases yourself from the ios mail settings*, but they won’t look right to the recipient unless you turn them on here first.
Note: this checkbox merely enables sending from your other addresses via Gmail. To actually add your additional addresses to the built-in Mail app, you have to follow the instructions in the footnote of this post.
You can enable ‘delete email as trash’, which the normal gmail account settings in ios don’t allow you to do. If you just created a gmail account on ios the easy way, your only option is to archive the messages, which takes up storage space on your gmail account, even if you don’t want the messages anymore. By checking this box, you will be able to delete messages on the server side and archive the ones you want to keep.
Finally, you can also select up to 25 of your Google Calendars to sync to your device. setting up gmail the easy way in settings only allows you to sync the main calendar associated with your gmail address. but what good is that google calendars allows each user to create different calendars for different things. From the google sync website, you can turn them all on, even shared calendars you’ve subscribed to.
2. set up an exchange account for calendars (and contacts if you wish)
so far, we follow the google book. The next step is to set up a Microsoft Exchange account, not a Gmail account, for your calendars (and contacts). This will allow you to accept event invitations and ensure all event reminders are triggered on your iPhone or iPad.
but after too many sync problems, I no longer sync email this way. we’ll cover it in the next section.
Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars and add an Exchange account. Enter your Gmail address in ‘Email,’ again in ‘Username,’ and enter your password. Leave ‘Domain’ blank. In ‘Description,’ instead of “Exchange,” put in “Google Calendars.” Then hit ‘Next.’
On the next screen, a field called “server” appears. enter m.google.com. after saving that, you will see radio buttons for “mail”, “contacts” and “calendars”. turn on calendars and turn off mail. And before we continue, let’s talk about contacts.
personally, google contacts seem incomplete to me. i use apple address book for contacts which is also what all other apps use so it makes more sense for me to keep contacts there instead of in gmail. I have contact sync turned on for my icloud account and I don’t use any gmail contacts feature. I know icloud can be spotty, but contacts are the only thing that always seem to sync perfectly.
That said, if you use gmail contacts, you can enable them at this point to sync them with your address book.
3. set up a generic imap account for email
Google’s instructions don’t take this extra step, but I promise you it works better. apple mail communication with gmail can be questionable, and this is the best remedy.
In the Mail, Contacts, Calendars menu, you now have an Exchange account called Google Calendars for calendars (and maybe contacts), and you probably already have an iCloud account for other things. That’s also where you’ll sync contacts if you do it my way.
Now you are going to create a third account, this one is for email only, but don’t use the gmail shortcut. it won’t work properly with all the google sync stuff we set up in step one. tap ‘add account’, scroll to the bottom and tap ‘other’. tap ‘add email account’ on the next screen.
enter your full name, email address, password and description on the next page. I recommend ‘gmail’ as a description.
On the next screen, fill in the incoming and outgoing mail servers. the incoming hostname is imap.gmail.com. you need to enter your gmail address and password again in “incoming mail server”. the outgoing hostname is smtp.gmail.com. Normal gmail users don’t have to enter login information for outgoing mail, but users of google apps (and a few others) do. If you can’t send mail after following the instructions in this guide, try adding your login information for outgoing mail and see if that fixes it. (thanks, commenters!)
You Did It!
I know. that was too much work. But now you’re all set, and your built-in mail and calendar apps (and maybe contacts) should sync correctly with google. as far as you’re concerned, it’s all one unified account. all that black magic that set you up may be a secret. In a world of Google versus Apple, this is the best customer service we can get if we want to use both. but after all this annoying configuration, it just works.
* how to set up more shipping addresses:
This is a geeky feature so I made it a footnote, but if you have multiple email addresses that you use to send email through your gmail account, this is how you set them up.
After you’ve done all of the above, go to your email account settings. under “imap account information”, you will see a field called “email”. will have your gmail address. to add more shipping addresses, all you have to do is put a comma-separated list of addresses in that field. the problem is that you can’t write commas in that field.
so tap on the ’email’ field, copy the email address to the clipboard and go to the notes app or something. paste it there, and then type all the email addresses you want to send from in the order you’d like to see them, separated by a comma and a space, like this: example@gmail.com, example@work.com, example@sideproject .net. then copy the entire list, go back to your email settings and paste everything into that “email” field.
The next time you send a message, you’ll see a dropdown menu that allows you to choose the address you want to send it from.