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

GCalSync is an app that offers two-way synchronisation between your mobile/cell phone or Blackberry and Google Calendar.

You can download events from GCal to your mobile phone and upload events created on your mobile, although at the moment, changes made to events on your mobile are not synced.

The past and future date ranges are user-customisable.

Currently the app does not support reminders and treats repeating events as multiple single events, but the developer promises more features soon.

Lots of Nokia handsets are supported as well as many Sony Ericsson models and two Motorola phones (not my RAZR, however, hence no screenshots).

You can read more about it and download the app on the developer’s web site or just point your phone at http://wap.gcalsync.com to get started.Google calendar, cell phone, mobile phone, blackberry, syncing, nokia, productivity

Five quickies:

1. Seamonkey 1.0 , the open source next generation of the Netscape communicator suite has been released. Although it is based on the Mozilla 1.8 code base, Seamonkey is not the same thing as Thunderbird plus Firefox. The projects have taken off in slightly different directions. You can find a good chart of the differences on Chirs Ilias’ web site. UPDATE: The Blue Ferret reviews Seamonkey.
2. Rob Griffith at MacWorld offers a tip that shows you how to reply to an email while keeping the original open in its own window (Hold down the Option key while clicking on Reply, Reply All or Forward).
3. Speaking of the rise and rise of the Mail-like look, Fraser Spiers is suffering Expos?ɬ© confusion . So many of his apps now look like Mail.app that it is hard to tell them apart. UPDATE: He has posted an even more striking photo of the confusion on flickr.
4. David Pogue shows you how to reconfigure the Address Book of a Motorola Razr (the world’s top-selling cell/mobile phone) to make it more user-friendly and efficient to use. Nice one!. See also, if you are into that sort of thing, his comparison between the Razr and the Blade , Samsung’s new Razr clone.
5. A spammer writes to say, “I read over your blog, and i found it inquisitive.” Honestly!