Keeping Mail.app, Gmail and mobile phone mail in sync
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006
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, syncing