two fer tuesday

You lucky blog reader, you! Two updates in one day, after such a lengthy absence. Whatever shall you do with yourself?

Probably tune right out, unless you're a tech-savvy (or at least tech-curious) gmail user who likes to keep their mail on one too many devices! This is my story - I hope it's useful for those of you "coping" with the advent of Gmail IMAP.

I guess that most people check their Gmail mostly from three different places: the office, at home, and on the go. Thanks to Gmail's new trick (namely IMAP), you now have some new options. For the longest time, I've checked my Gmail account at home on a Windows PC running Outook via POP. This worked just fine for me. Sure, if I sat in the office all day emailing people (and not working) then I'd have a bit of cleaning up to do when I got home. After all, the web interface doesn't sync w/POP clients - it just dumps new messages to the client and leaves it up to you how to handle them. Simple rules handle my most common messages. I've done this for years, so I have an elaborate (and hefty) virtual filing cabinet of emails.

Recently, I migrated all of that clutter over to my new iMac. I chose to go with Mail.app for email (because it's free, and its slick). Sure, that means I need two more apps to handle my calendars and contacts (iCal and Address Book, also included), but I'm OK with that since OS X does so much behind-the-scenes coordination between these applications anyway. I don't even think of them as three separate apps, really. Anyway, all of that to say this: I use Mail.app at home to check my Gmail via POP, and a combination of Mailboxes on my Mac and rules to deal with organizing them.

At work, I use the capable default Gmail web interface. A little background: I provide computer support for a branch of the government. I support primarily Windows PCs, but on a limited level, I also support Macs. I keep a Linux machine running for various tools and utilities that Microsoft has no excuse for not including in its very much not free operating system. That said, I could be using one of three web browsers from one of a couple hundred computers at any given time to take a quick look at my email. The web interface is the obvious choice.

On the go, I use my iPhone. Until now, I've used the default POP connection here as well. It's somewhat clumsy, since there is no mechanism for rules (or Smart Folders) so I'm stuck with a couple of annoyances, the most painful of which is an Inbox full of my own sent messages.

Along comes IMAP. For the uninitiated, let's review: IMAP basically differs from POP in one major way - synchronization. It allows you to connect multiple clients to a single account and have basically the same directory structure and message statuses in each place (yes, I looked up the plural form of status). "Beautiful!" you say. "All of your problems are solved!" Well, not really... remember that massively complex (and intricately nested) system of filed emails I mentioned? It would be a nightmare to try and migrate that to the IMAP environment. One major reason for this is that Gmail doesn't properly support nested folders. Another is that some of my folders don't have a simple rule for their contents. In other words, I'd have to manually sort through thousands of messages in order to migrate to IMAP. No, thanks... I'll stick w/POP at home.

However, this IMAP thing does solve a lot of problems for the iPhone - I can have a number of labels in Gmail that make finding important messages much easier. These show up as folders on the iPhone, the contents of which may exist in the Inbox as well. This is confusing unless you keep the mentality of labels and not of folders. Most importantly, I can forget the headache of dealing with my sent messages in my inbox. All in all, IMAP i the obvious choice for the iPhone.

This has a slight impact on how I view my email at work. I now have labels to deal with, which is fine. I'm actually growing fond of the concept of labels, in spite of my affinity for adherence to widely accepted standards. Gmail turns up the prettiness factor by allowing you to color-code your labels. How festive.

Final thoughts: after using the iPhone via IMAP for a while, you might notice some rules in the Gmail web interface that you didn't create. This is because the Drafts, Sent, and Deleted folders on your client don't line up to those of the server by default (surely to be fixed in the next iPhone software update). It's a simple thing to fix manually: from your iPhone, go to Settings and then to Mail. Open up your Gmail IMAP account, and tap Advanced. Note the section at the top showing you how your Drafts, Sent, and Deleted Mailboxes are mapped to the server. Tap Drafts. Now, under "On the Server" tap [Gmail]/Drafts. Repeat for Sent and Deleted, and you're good to go. You can delete those labels in Gmail now (check to make sure they're empty, as they should be). I guess this would work the same from any IMAP client.

As always, your mileage my vary.