For the record, I finally bit the bullet and ditched my iPhone for a Palm Pre last week, and I’m extremely happy with the switch. I’ll post in more detail about why the Pre (and particularly WebOS) is freaking fantastic soon, but for now here’s a quick tip for other Palm Pre owners who want to configure their Pre to use MobileMe and can’t figure out why it keeps claiming you’re doing it wrong.

Although some people have apparently had luck using the automatic setup (where you just enter an email address and your password), I needed to use the manual setup in order to get it to use IMAP rather than POP. I think recent MobileMe accounts don’t even have POP activated by default, so maybe the age of my account is the problem. In any case, if the automatic setup booted you into POP3 rather than IMAP, delete the account and recreate it. From the screen where it asks for your username and password, open the menu and choose “Manual Setup” (why they didn’t just stick a Manual Setup button on the main screen where anybody could find it is beyond me, but I digress).

Here’s all the settings you’ll need to get rolling:

• Incoming mail server: mail.me.com
• Username: [your username, without @me.com or @mac.com]
• Password: [your password]
• Encryption: SSL
• Port #: 993 (this should be automatically selected when you choose SSL)

• Outgoing mail server: smtp.me.com
• User Authentication: On
• (Username and password will be auto-filled)
• Encryption: TLS (this is what was probably screwing you up if you tried manual setup already)
• Port #: 587

These settings work perfectly for me; hopefully they’ll save other Pre users with MobileMe the headache of “SMTP setup failed” errors.