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.mail.app, apple mail, gmail, syncing, imap, pop, email, mobile phone, cell, blackjack Similar Posts:

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