Keeping Mail.app, Gmail and mobile phone mail in sync
Brad Garland has a problem. He wants to keep the email in a Desktop email client (Apple Mail), a web-based service (Gmail) and on his mobile phone (Samsung Blackjack) in sync.
For me that’s not too hard. With Mail.app, an IMAP-based email service and a Nokia E60, it all syncs very nicely. If I wanted to, I could pipe my Gmail account through Fastmail 
as well, following Mike Davidson’s excellent walk-through.
Brad has set himself a harder target. He doesn’t like to use Google Mobile because it’s a pain to access.
And he likes to make the web-based interface his primary client, so he is connecting his Blackjack to Gmail via POP. It’s not much fun:
I am unable to delete any message from my phone and have it know to sync back up to Mail. When I send/receive again it just brings the message right back. So no deleting is possible from my mobile. But marking things as read/unread are… that’s strange to me. Why can it do one and not the other?
Finding a way to sync these three things can only get more important as more people look for more ways to access more of their email in more places.
Dan Warne finds a way to keep Mail.app, Gmail and his mobile email in sync with a Blackberry.
As he explains in an email:
The Blackberry can check up to 10 different mail accounts (including Gmail thanks to its POP access). But actually, I just forward all my email from all my different accounts into my Gmail account and have the Blackberry download from there.
The clever part is the autoconfiguration — you just put in your email address, username and password, and RIM’s database of mailservers works out the rest. As a result, all email sent FROM your blackberry is sent via Gmail’s SMTP and stored in the ’sent’ folder at Gmail. You can also choose to cc: all sent emails to an address of your choice.
And because Blackberry’s access to Gmail is “non-destructive” he gets a full POP download of all his messages in Mail.app. A neat but expensive solution.
Short of something unexpected like, say, Gmail offering IMAP connectivity or Blackberry giving him a free phone, I wonder what the solution for someone in Brad’s position is. It seems harsh just to say, learn to live with the pain of Google Mobile.
Tags: Apple Mail, blackjack, cell, email, GMAIL, imap, mail.app, mobile phone, POP, syncingRelated posts
December 5th, 2006 at 12:50 am
Don’t know how it compares to a real Blackberry, but a lot of phones now have “Blackberry Connect” available to them, which uses Blackberry’s service but integrates with the phone’s existing mail client. In many cases it’s a download if your phone doesn’t already have it (that’s the case with the Nokia E61 for example.)
December 5th, 2006 at 2:49 am
You can log into Gmail as “recent:username@gmail.com” and get true POP access on multiple devices / clients for all mail newer than thirty days.
December 5th, 2006 at 3:31 am
Thanks for the post.
A bit of clarification. Yes, I would prefer to use Google webmail interface as my primary client but using Mail.app is fine. Better in some ways.
So if its possible to work with Mail.app that would be great!
Thanks!
December 5th, 2006 at 4:36 am
Don’t know about the compatibility with a BlackJack but on my SE phone GMail’s Java application works great and is much better to use than the WAP interface:
http://www.google.com/mobile/gmail/index.html
December 5th, 2006 at 6:10 am
How about just eschewing gmail altogether? If it doesn’t do what you want, why kill yourself trying to make it do so. Find a service that will work with your setup…
December 5th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
I hear you but the problem is that it is for my business. We have multiple people using Gmail hosted interface.
December 5th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
@John — I never knew that. Is that a closely guarded secret, or is it written down somwhere?
December 5th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
Why can’t Mail.app have threading like gmail’s? This aspect of gmail’s interface keeps me using webmail and not Mail.app. The current implementation in Mail.app attempts to do this, but groups emails with the same subject, etc that aren’t part of the same conversation.
December 5th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
@Scott — I don’t think that Mail threads by subject line. See the comments on an earlier post here.
December 8th, 2006 at 2:37 am
No, it definitely threads by subject line *as well as* thread-id stuff. When two people write me messages — separated by weeks — with the identical subject e.g. “hi there”, Mail.app often threads them together. Grrrr.
December 11th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Scott, Mithras, I just googled my way here with the same issue. I had sent two completely unrelated messages with the same subject line and now when I’m looking at my sent mail it tells me they are in the same thread. They aren’t! But there’s nothing I can do about it!
December 13th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
I have Verizon and WirelessSync and want to use GMail the way Brad does [sort of] as a spam filter so I can get more or less good email from my various accounts by sending them thru GMail [right now I have them forwarded to GMAil and then read GMail when I’m on the road with my MacBookPro. But the warning posted ref WirelessSync use with GMail says one has to set up GMail as a POP account…which, I think would mean when I used VErizon’s program to grab the mail, it’d take it off the server = but I want to keep the mail on GMail server, just be able to access it….Am I wrong, is GMail POP really nondestructive? Or does it act like other POP setups and take emails off the server??? Thanks!
January 5th, 2007 at 8:01 am
I can confirm that the recent:@gmail.com workaround has worked for me on a Samsung Blackjack.
I have a gmail account that I wanted to access via POP on both my phone and using Mail.app on my mac. Previously, it would work fine using just as the incoming username and @gmail.com for the outgoing one. However, this was only if my phone got to the message first, then my laptop would download it later also. If my laptop downloaded it fist, then phone would never get it.
After changing the incoming username on my phone to recent:@gmail.com - no changes on the Mail.app settings on my laptop, both the laptop and the phone seem to be able to receive messages regardless of the order in which they were accessed.
Outgoing messages sent from either the laptop or the phone also make it into the sent messages folder in gmail’s web client.
Thanks for the tip!
January 5th, 2007 at 8:04 am
Sorry, I would like to say that in my above post, the recent:@gmail.com references were supposed to say
recent:username@gmail.com
as in John’s earlier post. I made the mistake of putting them between carrot marks.
January 17th, 2007 at 4:56 am
BenHMin,
With the workaround you described, don’t all of your emails that you send from your blackjack also get returned to you as if they were new emails? I’m having this problem and was wondering what you may be doing differently if not. Thanks!!
January 17th, 2007 at 8:24 am
I found a way to make it work perfectly after a whole day of work. The write up is at:
http://www.freewebs.com/gmailforblackjack/ hope it works for you guys.
June 30th, 2007 at 9:16 am
The POP service for gmail works on my MotoQ, but after it downloads the email, it disapears without me deleting it.
Any suggestions?