Do a quick Google search about push notification and the iPhone and the results you'll get are mainly about the how the Apple service and iPhone feature got off to rocky start and does work effectively. Well, if you're a MobileMe member hopefully you have discovered that the kinks for Push Notification have been worked out. But if you haven't started using the service, you're really not getting your money's worth as a MobileMe member.

If some reason you're not that familiar with how Push Notification works with your MobileMe account, it's explained and shown on Apple's website. The purpose of this article is to encourage you to use the service if you're not already doing so, and to share some of the quirks that that I've discovered since setting up my iPhone.

This article will focus on Push email because using this feature has been for me the biggest time saver out of the three contact services for MobileMe. First off, the advantages with using MobileMe Mail is that unlike other mail services, MobileMe Mail stays in sync with your iPhone and your desktop and laptop computers. When I first setup my iPhone for email, I included a non-MobileMe mail account which did not sync between my desktop and my iPhone. Unfortunately, however, most of my emails were coming to my Surewest (i.e. my non-MobileMe) mail account. If I wanted to read those emails on my iPhone, it meant having to check and delete them three times, once on my desktop and again on my iPhone and laptop computer. Plus, deleting email messages on the iPhone, as any user may know, entails selecting each individual message and then hitting the delete button. There's no "select all" button for email messages on iPhone, which is something that still boggles my mind about the iPhone.

So in order to take full advantage of Push Notification,  I decided to convert most of my client and other important emails over to my MobileMe account. In doing this process, I also started unsubcribing to a couple of dozen email newsletters and announcements that I received on a regular basis, simply to cut down on the number emails I was receiving each day. Essentially I don't want to spend more that 10 minutes a day managing emails. In transferring important emails to my MobileMe account, I found that I'm spending less time checking and managing email messages.

Sure, having an "@me.com" as part of your email account is not be great for business, but it sure is great for saving time.

Before I explain more about MobileMe Mail, I need to point out that Push email works pretty much the same way for Yahoo Mail, which is, by the way, free. Also, if you want to use your MobileMe account for business purposes, but your business account is not your MobileMe account, you can probably have those emails forwarded to your MobileMe account and no one will know the difference.

It's fairly easy to set up a MobileMe mail account. See here for how to do it. If you're reading this article, you might already have a MobileMe mail account, but what you may not be using is the Alias feature of your account. You can create up to five email aliases for your account that you might want to use for different purposes. Your main/default account my be used for family and friends, or clients, while your aliases may be used for online registrations, purchasing products, joining mailing lists and so on. See here for creating aliases.

Caveat: One important thing Apple does not point out about setting up aliases is that you can't set them up as individual accounts on your Mail or iPhone mail application. All the aliases come to one MobileMe mailbox.

The Joy of Push Notification

Once you have your account set up, you should be on the road to saving more time when it comes to email. When Push email is working at it's best, you can actually see that when you delete an email in your account on say your iPhone, that same email will get deleted a few seconds later on the Mail application on your computer. When an email is sent to your MobileMe account (i.e. on Apple's server), it appears both on your iPhone and your computer about the same time. It doesn't work this way 100% of time, but allowing the synching or pushing process to occur means that managing emails on your account should not be a redundant process. If Push email is not working fast enough on your iPhone, pushing the sync icon at the bottom left of the mail application should do the trick.

You can also set up some folders on your MobileMe mail account that you can save emails to. These folders are also synced between your account on Apple's server, your iPhone, and your computer(s) are good way to keep your mail boxes managed and clean.