When Apple announced a couple years back that MobileMe (at the time it was called .Mac) and iWeb were going to allow for a personal domain, I was pretty geeked. At least I was until I found out that I couldn't use personal domain email with my MobileMe account.

It wasn't a huge deal at the time, so I let it go and didn't think much of it. I didn't use .mac email anyway and was more excited about the fact that I could host my personal website (www.beighley.name) on MobileMe.

Then, after I bought my iPhone 3G, I once again revisited the issue of using personal domain email with my MobileMe account, but still, Apple wouldn't allow it. Over-the-air syncing with MobileMe and the iPhone was an awesome feature, but I was a little frustrated by the idea of having multiple email accounts on my iPhone. You see, I have email addresses all over the place as it is, and to make my life simpler, I just have them all go to one inbox. The ability to use these email addresses with my MobileMe account would have been the perfect fit.

So earlier this year, I decided to figure out exactly what it was going to take to get my personal domain email accounts to play nicely with MobileMe, and once I discovered the solution, I laughed at how easy it turned out to be.

So here is what you will need:

1. Ability to manage your personal domain email accounts, most importantly, the ability to forward those accounts to another email address.
2. An active Gmail account.
3. A MobileMe account with Apple

The first thing you need to do is have all of your personal domain email accounts forward to your .me or .mac email address. For my purposes, I needed to forward my email addresses for beighley.name and vortexnetworking.com to my MobileMe email address.

The next thing you need to do is log into Gmail and setup your email addresses. This is done by clicking on "Settings", then "Accounts" and selecting "Add another email address that you own". Once you add your account, Google will need to verify that you own that email address. A verification number will be sent to the email address, but remember, we already forwarded the email to your MobileMe account, so check there first. Repeat this for each of the email accounts that you own.

Next, while still in the account settings on Gmail, you need to choose your default account. This is the email address that will be the default "Send From" address when you send a new message.

After you select the default address, select "Reply from the same address the message was sent to" under "When Receiving a Message:".

Gmail Reply From SettingsAt this point, Gmail is ready to go. Next, we need to configure your email program to use Gmail as the sending server. For my purposes, I am using Apple Mail:

1. Open Apple Mail and select "Mail > Preferences".Click to Enlarge
2. Click on the "Accounts" tab. If you have more then one account, click to highlight your MobileMe account.
3. Open the Outgoing Mail Server list and select "Edit Server List".
4. Under the list of servers, click the + sign to add a new server.
5. Under description, type "gmail" and in the server field, type smtp.gmail.com.
6. Click the "Advanced Tab".
7. "Use Default Ports" should be selected as well as the box that says "Use SSL".Click to Enlarge
8. Under "Authentication", select "password" For username, use your Gmail email address and then provide your Gmail password.
9. Click "OK" and the make sure that 'gmail' is set as the default "Outgoing Mail Server". Also, be sure to check the box that says "Use only this server".

That's it, your all done. Now when you send a message from your MobileMe account, it will send from your personal domain email address (even though it won't look like it in your email program).

Keep in mind that this won't work if your are sending from the MobileMe website. It should also be noted that a copy of all your sent emails will be stored on your Gmail account unless you delete them.

I've included some pictures on the iPhone setup which is fairly similar to what I described above.

If you have any questions or anything is not clear, please feel free to let me know.