Using Gmail as your email centre with your own domain email address and an iPhone

One of the smaller "issues" with having my own domain on a normal (nothing fancy) web server (in fact, just some web space, it’s not the whole server) is that the webmail interface I’m using (provided by the hoster) is extremely simple. Searching through mails is inconvenient, I can only write plaintext emails (no images, no formatting….), etc.  That’s why I’ve been using Outlook to grab my emails via POP3.
Drawback of this approach is, of course, that once they were downloaded, I could only access them from my notebook (which was not always with me).
I was deliberating whether I should get the emails via IMAP instead, but I was still not happy with the web interface, which I need to use whenever I don’t have my notebook with me (e.g. at work, sometimes when I travel, etc.).

In the end, I decided to try a different approach:
I pull the emails from my own domain to my Gmail account, which I access via IMAP from both Outlook (well, not yet right now, as my current notebook is unused as it freezes regularly; new laptop coming in the next few weeks) and the iPhone. Through the Gmail web interface, I also have a very convenient and feature-rich way of accessing them as well as sending out emails. In order to make this work, however, I had to make some smaller changes to the way the iPhone accesses the emails and sends them (incoming emails through Gmail, outgoing emails through my own domain). Once I have my new laptop and Outlook installed on it, I will configured it similar (e.g. as in here http://products.secureserver.net/email/email_outlook.htm)
Below are the steps how I set everything up.

This was my initial setup:

I pulled the emails from my own domain from my Outlook, whereas I also accessed them (as long as they were on the server) from my iPhone (which also got my Gmail emails, which were only a handful each month anyway; my domain email address is my major email).

This is the new setup with my Gmail account being the centre of the setup:

My Gmail account pulls the emails from my own domain email address. I access these then through Gmail via IMAP from both the iPhone and Outlook

Setting up Gmail

First of all, I configured Gmail to get the emails from my own down account. Under Settings and the Accounts and Import tab, I selected Add POP3 email account in the Check mail using POP3 section:

In the next screen, I added my account information from my domain account. Furthermore, I kept Leave a copy of the retrieved message on the server unchecked so that there are no duplicate emails anywhere.

After confirming, I selected my newly added account as the default account for sending emails, and chose Always reply from default address so that any emails will be sent directly through my own email account (note: the outgoing SMTP server has to be configured for this as well).

That’s it already, Gmail now fetches all emails from my @modery.net account, and additionally any emails sent through Gmail (or rather, the Gmail web interface) will be sent from it as well.

Setting up iPhone
On my iPhone, I needed to set up a connection to Gmail, however not through the default Gmail option, but through Other. The reason for this is that this way it is possible to set a different outgoing server than the incoming server. This is necessary as you would otherwise send/reply from your Gmail email address, not your own domain email address!

Next step, I selected Add Mail Account

I entered the relevant information for my own domain email account, and confirmed. In the next screen, I kept IMAP

Now comes the crucial part: In this screen, I added my Gmail account information (imap.gmail.com as host name, and the correct user name and password) for the Incoming Mail Server. For the Outgoing Mail Server, I added the correct SMTP server for my own domain and the relevant login information.

For the next step, I kept Mail, but did not select Notes (didn’t test if it works as I don’t need it).

The last thing to do is to set up the corresponding Drafts/Sent/Deleted Mailboxes. For the just set up account, I went to the Advanced settings

And selected the three options above.

so that it looks like this:

That’s it!
What happens now is that on my iPhone my email is fetched from the Gmail account (which, as outlined above, collects the email from my own domain account). If I send an email through this account (either create a new one or reply to an email), the server of my own domain account is used instead of the Gmail account, and thus any replies come from @modery.net