We're discussing in another thread how you can emulate "PUSH" in Gmail by simply having your mail forwarded to a yahoo account.
But that sucks, because you have no way to hit reply on one of those emails and have it come FROM your Gmail account (or whatever FROM address you have set up in Gmail)
I researched what PUSH e-mail really is, and it generally comes down to being an IMAP server with the IDLE extension installed -- just a little function to make your connection to the mail server doesn't time out, so the server can tell you about new mail when it comes in.
So the ultimate setup would be to have Gmail forward your mail to an IMAP account with the IDLE extension, and for the SMTP server in your phone, you'd put Gmail SMTP server. Problem solved! Your E-mail gets pushed directly to your phone, it's spam filtered, and your replies and new mails come from your gmail account! And when you're setting up forwarding, you can make a filter that only forwards mail from: -"your@email.com" -- which eliminates the problem where Gmail sends your sent mail to your phone as though it's new mail!
This is actually incredibly easy. Easier than I thought, because I run a dedicated server with Cylus IMAP4rev1 installed, with IDLEd! So I set everything up with Gmail and my phone just like I described above. Everything checked out. Problem is . . . PUSH isn't working. I'm looking at my server right now and IDLEd is running, so there's only two possibilities for what's going wrong:
1. The iPhone automatically disconnects from the mail server once it's done checking, unless that mail server is yahoo. That would suck.
2. I don't have my mail server set up right. Possible, but not likely.
If you have an IMAP account *anywhere* with IDLE support, please give this a try and report back here! If anyone can find a server that actually *does* PUSH on an iPhone, our problem is solved! As it stands now, though, I just have my phone automatically check mail every 15 minutes, and that's still better than any other solution so far, and solves the Gmail reply glitch. Just wish I had push
