Here's an update to my post of nearly 2 weeks ago. Since setting up my Gmail account, I decided to give IMAP a try. If you aren't familiar with IMAP, here's something I found on downloadsquad.com:
"Why is IMAP integration a good thing for Gmail? POP was a stepping stone, but IMAP pushes Gmails benefits over the top. With IMAP, users can now access their email via a desktop application like Outlook or Thunderbird, read emails, make changes, delete, and have the changes made across platforms. So if you now log into your Gmail account, the message which you read in Thunderbird, will now be marked accordingly. No more wasting time trying to sift through emails that had already been answered."
Sounded good to me. So I took the plunge and set my iPhone up with IMAP. Google even has complete instructions for setting up your Gmail IMAP account on your iPhone. Here's the link:
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77702
Follow the instructions, and you'll be up in no time. I am SO glad I did this. I am e-mailing from my iPhone as I had always wished I could. It's a dream. All of my mediacom e-mails now go straight to my Gmail account, and when I reply to anything, it shows my mediacom e-mail address in the from field. It's completely seamless with my Mediacom account.
As a side note, I finally decided to go back into my Mediacom settings and change it so that it would NOT keep a local copy. What that means is that all of my e-mail is going straight from Mediacom to Gmail. I don't get anything directly from Mediacom anymore. Why do I want to go through everything twice? The only thing I was having a little trouble with (not trouble really, just a hang up of mine) was that I like to keep a local copy of some of my e-mails on my PC. Many times over the years I've had to go searching through e-mails more than a few years old to find something for reference. I solved that hang-up tonight by finally switching my Outlook e-mail client (on my PC) over to IMAP as well. I need to point out that since my last post, I hadn't been using Outlook at all. I was using Gmail online for all of my e-mail needs. However, I just feel better being able to save certain e-mails on my PC for future reference. After I switched the account settings in Outlook over from POP3 to IMAP, it took a few times of sending/receiving (and even closing Outlook once and opening it back up) before all of my folders on Gmail appeared. But they are there. And when I move something to a particular folder, it also gets moved online. And vice versa, if you can believe it. Here's a link to setting up your Gmail IMAP account with different clients:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=75726
If you have trouble with your Outlook slowing down while using the IMAP protocol, see this article:
http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/solutions-for-slow-gmail-imap-with-micr osoft-outlook/1761/
Don't forget, in order to be able to use IMAP with your Gmail account, you have to go into Google's Gmail settings, and click on Forwarding and POP/IMAP, then under IMAP Access, click Enable IMAP.
So back to the original question again, maybe it's a round about way to get Mediacom's e-mail working with the iPhone, but in truth, it's a far better solution than "just getting mediacom to work." I hope you'll find this solution more than satisfactory.