Several of our readers have written in and asked how to make their iPhone stop sending them copies of their outgoing Gmail. Here's how. Go to Settings -> Mail -> (Your Gmail account) -> Advanced. Switch "Use Recent Mode" from ON to OFF. Be aware that the first time you do this, you may end up sucking a bunch of old messages into your iPhone inbox. (I had about a dozen old emails which shows exactly how little I use my gmail account.) It's a one time thing, though. After you get rid of those old e-mails by disabling "recent mode", your iPhone will stop sending you those outgoing copies.
Update: This option keeps getting weirder. TUAW reader digitalintrigue discovered that copies of outgoing mail sent from gmail's website still get sent to the iPhone although copies of iPhone-originated mail do not. I tried this out and confirmed the behavior.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
7-11-2007 @ 4:27PM
Brian Rose said...
Apparently this isn't a solution for Google Apps for Your Domain users. :\
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7-11-2007 @ 4:32PM
tonyvia said...
When changing this setting, will my replies still appear in the conversation threads when using the web interface? I thought it was sending the copies for that reason.
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7-11-2007 @ 4:35PM
colomb said...
So, now I have all my read mail showing up starting from the first email in my mailbox. Not sure this is a great solution.
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7-11-2007 @ 4:39PM
schlomo said...
THANK YOU! That has been bugging the hell out of me!!!
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7-11-2007 @ 4:51PM
Gillian said...
Agreed - this isn't the best solution. When I first set up my Gmail, it started downloading old messages - it started saying that I had 2,000,000 messages to read.
Setting up Gmail as a POP account worked better.
I'm starting to wonder if I should just set up a new gmail, forward all new mail and then set a reply-to... Hmm...
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7-11-2007 @ 4:53PM
murph said...
darn!! i thought this was going to be a setting in GMail that would stop the sent items from showing up on my Windows Mobile device as well. $%#!
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7-11-2007 @ 4:55PM
Jon said...
The reason you get those emails is because gmail uses tags to sort your mail. The iPhone doesn't know the difference between a newly sent message and a newly received message. So if you do as the post suggests any messages you send from your iPhone won't end up in your gmail's sent mail. It will however end up in your gmail's inbox...just not on your iPhone. At least that is what happened to me. Correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, I'd rather delete the sent message from my iPhone and have gmail stay in tact on the server so that next time I log into it on my mac it's "normal"
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7-11-2007 @ 5:05PM
Kedar said...
This isn't a solution to prevent mail sent from the GMail web-client from appearing in the iPhone Mail inbox. I'm not even certain this accomplishes anything with respect to sent mail...
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7-11-2007 @ 5:06PM
Ryan said...
This isn't a solution to the problem. Believe me, I've tried it. GMail always copies your sent mail to the Inbox so it can do the message threading.
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7-11-2007 @ 5:14PM
Brent said...
Great tip! This has really been bugging me.
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7-11-2007 @ 5:45PM
digitalintrigue said...
This worked for me...
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7-11-2007 @ 5:56PM
digitalintrigue said...
Upon further review, this 'fix' ends up putting outgoing mail from the Gmail web client in my iPhone inbox.
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7-11-2007 @ 6:27PM
scott said...
i can't find the website that told me about this, but if you want to enable the "recent" feature when accessing google apps email via pop on the iphone, just prefix your "User Name" with "recent:" -- ie "recent:name@domain.suffix" this will result in emails being downloaded to the iphone email app even if they've been downloaded by another client -- nice if you have a client running on a computer and you happen to be away from that computer but carrying your iPhone.
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7-11-2007 @ 6:43PM
Henry said...
Jon is right -- this is a problem in general. Gmail puts all messages in the same box. There's no concept of folders. Therefore any new mail that lands in the pile is a new message.
On my blackberry, I had to set up BIS to filter any messages that had my gmail account as the From:. Is there a way to put a rule on the iPhone mail to filter those messages?
Also Gmail's POP implementation is screwy -- if you have multiple systems downloading messages, the first device gets it, but the others don't. This isn't an issue with other POP email (like, say, Yahoo).
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7-11-2007 @ 7:09PM
poweruser82 said...
To override the problem just use an SMTP server other than Google's SMTP.
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7-11-2007 @ 7:28PM
scott said...
Henry -- look at my post 15 minutes earlier than yours. it details how to get around that.
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7-11-2007 @ 7:37PM
ian said...
This has not been working for me for a week.
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7-11-2007 @ 7:52PM
Brandon said...
I signed up for an AIM.com mail account (2gb, imap access) and have all of my gmail forward there and the outgoing still going through the gmail account. I don't touch the gmail account it just kinda does it's google apps for my domain-y goodness
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7-11-2007 @ 10:03PM
buriedpaul said...
A much better solution to this problem is discussed in this thread: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=323090
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7-11-2007 @ 10:17PM
20mc said...
One way is to go to your gmail preferences and select the Filter tab, create a new filter and insert your gmail address. finish up these steps and it should work. I haven't had any problems since.
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