How-To: Stop Multiple G-Mail Messages on Apple iPhone

If you are like me, you use your Apple iPhone for keeping up with email messages when you are away from your main computer. After all, that's one of the coolest things about having a mobile Internet device, right? Well, if you are using your Apple iPhone with your G-Mail account, then you have probably dealt with receiving unwanted copies of the email messages you send.

When you use G-Mail on the Apple iPhone, any time you send an email message to someone (from your iPhone or from your main computer), the message shows up as a new email message in your Inbox. You might say that this is a feature, well it is the default behavior anyway. To stop this behavior, from the Home screen on your Apple iPhone:
  1. Select Settings
  2. Select Mail
  3. Select the Account in question (your G-Mail account)
  4. Select the "Advanced" option
  5. Turn the "Use Recent Mode" feature Off.
  6. That's it! :)
The "multiple copies of email messages" issue is also a real pain when you first set up or restore your G-Mail account on the Apple iPhone. So, turning this feature off in advance of downloading any email (after a new setup or restore) can save a lot of time deleting those extra email messages!

2 comments:

Stephen said...

I tried this, but it had a bad side effect. Any message I received on my computer did not show up in my iPhone. Do you see this?

iPhoneWriter said...

No, not at all. One answer might be to make sure your computer "keeps a copy on the server" and the for the messages it checks/receives for the email account you are also using on the iPhone. Then, set your iPhone to remove messages from the Inbox... then, when the iPhone picks up the message, it will mark it as received.