MobileMe and me

August 6, 2008 in Uncategorized

I am one of those sorry souls who bought the original iPhone the day it came out. I didn’t have to stand in line, I just happen to live in a city that had shorter lines and a ton of inventory left just before the stores closed at 10pm.

The lure of push-email was enough to get me to upgrade my phone to the 2.0 firmware (that and super monkey ball, which ironically I never bought). The only problem is that my email habits have been pretty firm over the past 4 years in the form of Gmail. I have multiple email accounts end up in my Gmail inbox. All roads lead to Gmail, as it were. I have really gotten used to the Gmail view of mail… don’t delete anything, just archive and search. I don’t really use labels too much, except for filtering out mailing lists. The only feature that I use consistently was using multiple ‘From’ email addresses. I love being able to instantly switch what email account I’m sending mail from: gmail.com, my personal email account, or my work account. It makes life simple.

Except Gmail and IMAP don’t quite work the same way. When you delete a message with Gmail’s IMAP server, you do Archive the message online, but not the conversation, so it’s not a true sync. Also, Gmail’s IMAP can be pretty slow… very slow… And like a lot of people, I want push email.

Now, since I have a Mac and all that entails, I was not about to subject myself to the hell that is Entourage and Exchange. (If I was running Windows, I’d be all over an Exchange account and this post would never have happened). So, that means I’m trying out MobileMe. But since I want the ability to back out of this and go back to Gmail, the configuration is a bit different.

So far here’s my setup:
I have my work and personal email accounts forward to both Gmail and MobileMe. I then have Gmail forward things sent directly to Gmail to MobileMe. So now I get push email of all my accounts. But what about the two features that I use most: Archiving and Multiple email address sending? Turns out this is a bit harder.

Multiple email address sending is a bit easier to explain. On my Mac, in Mail, I have only my MobileMe account setup. It is set to use the Gmail SMTP servers as opposed to the MobileMe ones. Since MobileMe is just a fancy IMAP server, all send mail goes into the “Sent Messages” folder anyway, and this way Gmail still indexes the messages. Gmail is setup to accept (for sending) mail from my personal, work, and MobileMe accounts, so that is all the same. To get the Mac’s Mail app to support this, all you have to do is add each email address you support in the “Email Address” field in the Account setup screen (comma delimited).

On the iPhone it’s a bit more tricky. To get this to work, you need to setup email accounts for each address you’d like to use. And they have to be “Active”. But you don’t want to check all of those accounts. So once you have it all setup, you can then remove the information about the Incoming servers. This effectively makes the accounts send-only. I’ve gone ahead and made sure that the accounts use Gmail’s SMTP servers again, so Google can index things for me. The only downside is that I’ve lost the ability to access the sent message from my desktop machine’s Mail app, but I could access it from Gmail’s IMAP interface, if I really needed to.

Archiving things is a bit more tricky, and I’ll describe that (and my script that facilitates it – yes, it needs a little help) in a later post.

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