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

Every now and then you run across something in NetNewsWire that makes you chuckle.

I love Mail.app to death, but I am willing to admit that its IMAP support is less robust than it could be.

So the clever irony of this Freudian slip in a blogger’s headline struck me at once:

Sometimes Mail does frantically spin its wheels without getting anywhere. It needs a thrash folder.

However, the post he references on setting up Mail’s special IMAP folders for Sent, Drafts, Trash and Junk mail is excellent. Not knowing about this is a source of frustration to a lot of people on the Apple Discussion Boards and elsewhere.humour, mail.app, apple mail, imap, special folders, sent, drafts, junk, trash, IMAP

Eleven new entries to the Hawk Wings Plug-ins and Add-ons List brings the total number of plugins and utilities to tweak and stretch Mail.app, iCal and Address Book to over 140.

1. Address Book Dates (Age, star sign and iCal link for Address Book contacts) was added to the Address Book section.
2. LinkABoo (hyperlinks to Apple Mail messages in other apps) was added to the Added Functionality Section.
3. “Show Emails from…” (a quick way to list in Mail.app all the emails you have received from a particular contact) was added to the Address Book section.
4. MsgFiler (a “quick file” plugin for Mail.app) was added to the Added Functionality section.
5. IMAP-IDLE plugin (provides support in Mail.app for IMAP’s IDLE command) was added to the Added Functionality section.
6. Google Calendar plugin for Address Book (auto-fill Google Calendar events with contact information from your Address Book) was added to http://www.hawkwings.net/plugins.htm#address.
7. Signature Profiler (enables enhanced signature functions in Mail, HTML and image insertion) was added to the Added Functionality Section.
8. Mailsmith to Mail.app export script (a smarter way to get your emails out of Mailsmith into Mail) was added to the Switching section.
9. Portable Mail.app (a version of Mail that will run from a removable drive, flash drive or iPod) was added to the Added Functionality section.
10. Mailing List Burster (an applescript that splits mailing list digests up into individual messages) was added to the Added Functionality section.
11. rooSwitch (separate profiles for settings in Mail, Safari and other iApps) was added to the Added Functionality section.

mail.app, apple mail, plugins, ical, address book, applescript, addons, producivity, filing, IMAP, switching

Michael Rothwell has updated his excellent IMAP-IDLE plugin for Mail.app, which adds support to Mail for IMAP’s IDLE command , so that the server tells Mail.app when new mail arrives rather than Mail needing to poll the server.

This is obviously a much more intelligent way of handling the polling process.

The new version (1.05) contains a number of tweaks. It more reliably handles IDLE status messages and is smarter about detecting whether your mail server supports the IDLE command.

If it hasn’t worked for you in the past, it might now.

IMAP-IDLE is freeware and is available from Michael’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, imap, idle command, plugins, RFC 2177

I hate to go on endlessly about Fastmail , but how sweet is this announcement today?!

All users email is now on replicated servers. This means that every email delivered or deleted and every email action performed is replicated within a second to a completely separate server with a completely separate copy of all users emails.

We now have at least three levels of redundancy, three copies of every email, and all those copies are on RAID redundant storage themselves.

1. All users now have their email stored on a system with RAID disks and all servers and RAID arrays have dual power supplies. This means a single drive or power supply failure should cause no interruption to service at all, we just replace the drive/power supply while the system is live and online…
2. All users now have their email replicated to an identical replica system (RAID drives, dual power supplies, etc). Each system is completely separate…. The replication is performed at the semantic email level, not at the filesystem level. So a filesystem corruption on the source server will not be replicated. This means if there is a disk or filesystem corruption on a single machine, we can just switch to the replica…
3. All users have their email store backed up incrementally each night to a separate system and RAID array. The backups of email are kept for 1 week after the email is deleted to allow restoring in case of accident. In an emergency situation if both a master and replica server should fail catastrophically, we can still perform a restore from this backup…

[Full text ]email, backup, redundancy, fastmail, RAID, IMAP, redundant storage, sweet dreams

The owner of rtfa.net has posted a list of the things that are annoying, broken or just plain scandalous about Mail.app.

He is an unhappy Apple Mail user: “Well, if Thunderbird integrated with spotlight and OSX address book, it’d be a no-brainer. However, I’m entrenched.”

And life in the trenches with Mail.app is not good.

Three problems score the highest scandal rating — incorrect treatment of IMAP’s “seen flag”, the “lost message” problem and the “invalid pointer” problem.mail.app apple mail, bugs, problems, IMAP, flags, attachments, SSL, encryption, lost messages

Not long ago Mail.app guru Joe Kissell was talking up the virtues of IMAP for email.

Now PC World has a post on the advantages of IMAP over POP as the protocol that should be handling your email.

It points out the gains of having email stored on a remote server, especially if you move around or need to access the same email at home and at work (or anywhere else). Storing your email remotely also allows you the freedom to use different email clients—Thunderbird on a PC at work, Mail.app on the Mac at home or whatever.

Needless to say it is also nice to have the security of remote storage. Whatever happens to my MacBook Pro or its harddrive, I know my mail is safe.

For example, deleting the settings for a POP account in Mail can delete all the messages stored in that account’s local folders. When they are gone, they are really gone. With IMAP, I know that can never happen. I just download them again into Mail.app’s local cache. That’s saved my bacon a few times.

Of course, you need to have the IMAP option in order to use it. Many ISPs still don’t offer it. I have been a long-time and very happy Fastmail user.

Geir at codehaus has just jumped from POP to IMAP. He gives tuffmail (another specialised email service provider) a glowing review.

A quick glance at the features tuffmail offers (cf. Fastmail’s features ), suggests that it is more flexible and more expensive than Fastmail.

You can build your own package with the mailboxes, storage and features that you need. It offers Roundcube as an interface for its webmail service. On the other hand, you don’t get the WebDAV disk that an enhanced Fastmail account offers.

No doubt there are other providers with IMAP offerings just as rich and useful. It’s the best USD 40 that I spend each year.

In return I get an utterly dependable, first-class IMAP service. If only all the things to which I am addicted were that cheap!mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, imap, pop, storage, tuffmail, fastmail, specialist email providers