The short answer is that you don’t. You get your email onto whatever the iPad syncs with, and then the email will magically appear on your iPad (or at least some of it will, depending on how far back you sync.)

The iPad has three different ways to sync email.

POP3. If you use POP3 to access your email, then you are out of luck because POP3 doesn’t “synchronize” with the server. Instead, POP3 downloads the messages and deletes them from the server. Also, POP3 has no folder management.

IMAP: If your iPad connects to your email with IMAP, then your ipPhone or iPad will automatically sync with the IMAP server. If you need to get your mail from your current email client to an IMAP server, you can use Address Magic Personal PLUS to convert from numerous different email clients directly to IMAP.

ActiveSync: ActiveSync is like IMAP. Your iPhone or iPad will automatically sync with an ActiveSync server, you just need to get your email onto the server.

There is one special case and that’s Gmail. You can connect your iPad/iPhone to Gmail using POP3, IMAP, or ActiveSync. The best choice is to use ActiveSync because it will also sync your contacts and calendar. If you are using Gmail, then configure your iPhone or iPad to connect to Gmail with ActiveSync and your messages will automatically appear. If you are not using Gmail and you want to switch to Gmail, you can use Address Magic Personal PLUS to convert from numerous different email clients directly to Gmail.

Functionally, this means that you can leave the MiFi in your briefcase, connect to it from your laptop via WiFi, and get an Internet connection anywhere that Verizon offers data service. And you’ll be running on Verizon’s data network instead of AT&T’s much smaller network.

The game changer is that Verizon now offers Prepaid Mobile Service. When the MiFi was introduced, you had to sign up for two years of service at $60 per month, making the final bill well over $1500.  Now you can buy a MiFi off of eBay for $125 and pay for service by the day, week, or month.

A week of service costs $30 and a month of service costs $50. Starting this week, the monthly plan has been upgraded from 500MB to 1GB. These rates are very attractive for the person who travels rarely. The only downside is that you have to sign up for the service from an existing internet connection. Note that you can’t use the MiFi to buy more prepaid service unless you already have an active service plan.

I bought one for myself this week with a month of prepaid for our vacation this summer. The first time you configure it, you have to connect it to your PC or Mac via a USB cable and you have to install Verizon’s VZAccess software. The installation process was a little time consuming but not complicated. Once you’ve activated your prepaid service via the USB connection, you can do everything via WiFi.

After seeing this terrible result, we tested an iPhone 3G with the same wireless router. It ran at 2.8 Mbps downstream. Thinking it might be a problem with the Speedtest app, we used the App Store to download the same purchase to each phone. The 3G finished in about 30 seconds. The 3GS took about four minutes. So there was certainly a problem with the newer iPhone. The question was, where?

I spent an hour reading blogs this morning. There were all the normal recommendations about resetting the iPhone (no effect), turning off encryption (not a chance!), resetting the router, resetting the WiFi connection on the phone - all of which were useless.

I finally found the answer at the SupremeTechs blog.  Version 3.0.x of the iPhone has trouble with the default settings on many routers for the Fragmentation Threshold and CTS/RTS Threshold. I dropped those values back to 2305 and 2304 respectively, set the Preamble Mode to Long, and suddenly my iPhone 3GS started working. (This was with a NetGear WNDR3700 router.) Here are the results immediately after the fix – a 5x improvement, making it on par with the iPhone 3G:

You’ll notice that there’s a very high ping time. I’m not sure what’s causing that as the typical ping time to the Tucson server is 100ms. However, I tried later in the day and got substantially better downstream results:

The ping time for this last measurement is down to 120ms, which is about right.

This measure is still 4x slower than the rated performance of the Internet connection. If you look at the reviews for Speedtest.net, you’ll see a lot of low ratings for the app for just this reason. However, there’s a very good reason for this difference. The iPhone is running a relatively slow processor with very limited RAM and is desperately trying to conserve every minute of battery life. So the lower performance is expected .