Problem with iOS 7 and smtp Gmail

I have spent about 4-6 hours working directly with folks from Tim Cooke's office, various support levels, and through them their engineers.

As much as I tried to convince them their logic is flawed, the engineers for iCloud come back and say this is expected behavior because somehow it helps secure iCloud from being a spam source. The fine and helpful gentleman from Cooke's office now understands how it is a MobileMail.app client issue, having nothing to do with iCloud servers (because we are in fact trying to bypass their servers) still totes the "it's expected behavior" line from the server engineers.

I have implored him to follow up with the iOS MobileMail app programmers and not the iCloud programmers. I am hopeful he will. Until then you have to choose between having iCloud push and losing your online identity, or losing push email and keeping your preferred address.

Fun to try: turn off all smtp servers. Send email. Gets stuck in outbox. Turn on your preferred smtp server. That one email will use your preferred alternate address, but subsequent ones revert back to the old .me.com smtp servers. Personally I believe this points to a client programming error more than reinstating a preferred behavior. Aggravating!

I spend $500 on a new phone. Google takes away my exchange client ability and apple makes me choose push email vs outgoing email address.

Thanks for the in-depth analysis, KiltBear. I came down to the same existential question that you did: is this intentional or a bug? I found that if I set up a regular iCloud email account, added a secondary gmail SMTP server, and disabled the primary iCloud SMTP server, the UI claims that it will use the gmail server but it doesn't. Is that a bug or are they hard-coding iCloud SMTP on purpose? Either way, they should not make you think it's using gmail when it isn't.

It is a shame that we have to choose between losing our preferred email address or losing push email. If the iCloud group won't allow using other email addresses (and plenty of places such as Google and Microsoft do), I hope the MobileMail app group decides to allow other SMTP servers for iCloud accounts.

How long does your Push stay working? I've had it working since Friday afternoon with no issues...

In my case, each time I obtain a NEW application-specific password from Google (I use 2-factor auth), it works for a day or two and then will start asking me for a password again.

This is very frustrating.

I have Google set up as an Exchange account, using m.google.com and have tried both variations of my username (with and without @gmail.com), doesn't make any difference.

The only thing I haven't tried yet is deleting and re-adding the account from scratch, which I may do later.

Thank you, thank you! You set up totally fixed this problem for me. I disabled my iCloud mail account and set up a "hybrid" email account using gmail as the smtp server, and it works just like it did under iOS 6. I hated having to select the "from" account on every email that I sent. Awesome!

Cityriver, Thank you soo much, I have spent the last two days trying to figure this out, I followed your instructions step by step and I now get my Gmail Push mail back!!

Thank you again!🙂

By "hybrid" I mean that I use icloud setting for incoming mail, but gmail for outgoing. I already have gmail autoforwarding to my icloud account. I do this just to get push email. Do this:

Go to the Mail App or (Add Account)

You'll have to choose Other

Name (Your choice)

Email (Your @me or @icloud email)

Password (Apple id Password)

(Make sure it's IMAP)

Incoming Mail Server

Host Name (p02-imap.mail.me.com)

User Name (@me or @icloud email)

Password (Apple id Password)

Outgoing Mail Server (Your choice... Mine being gmail)

Host Name (smtp.gmail.com ....Gmail..in my case)

Username (Gmail... in my case)

Password (Gmail pw in my case 😉)

When I use p02-imap it takes away the option of push email.

If I take off the p02 and still set it up as other with gmail as smtp this works fine in terms of mail being shown to have been sent from my gmail account but I lose push notifications for incoming iCloud mail (despite the fact push is there and selected).

i had forgotten I'd set up the app specific pword for gmail, so I revoked my old one and generated a new one. Gmail working fine again, thanks

I cannot for the life of me get this to work in my iPhone 5 running iOS 7.0.3. I can get push email forwarded to iCloud but my sent mail always comes from iCloud and not gmail. I've tried a hybrid account and also adding a false SMTP iCloud server but to no avail. Can someone please post instructions that worked for them?

I've just discovered that this issue exists and I've been sending out email for the past few moths with the wrong address.

I've been using an alternative SMTP server since iOS6(ish) with no issues, but now I cannot switch off my iCloud SMTP server to default to a Gmail SMTP server. This must be a bug - but then a similar issue existed in iOS5 where the switch was greyed out.

Setting up an 'other' account with pxx-imap.mail.me.com etc breaks push.

The only solution I can find is to use the iCloud account with push as the 'main' email account, with a secondary 'other' account setup just to use the Gmail SMTP server, manually selecting this from the From field on each email sent.

What a pain. I can't think of any other single feature in iOS that's been so misleading and that causes such a block to functionality that spans over the past 3 years.

I don't understand Why Apple don't fix this error......

I don't either.

Just change your default email account to some other account besides Gmail and you'll be fine.

Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Default Account