My school is switching to gmail for our email later this week. I use mail most of the time, but I would like to be able to get onto gmail from any computer to check my mail. Is there anyway to sync mail and gmail to match each other with things like folders, address book, in box, etc.?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Syncing Gmail and Mail
- Thread starter insomniac321123
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
POP will not do exactly what the OP wants. I don't think there is a good way to do this. When you use POP, you get...
1) All messages stay on GMail after they get downloaded to your computer.
2) You can basically only use one computer at a time with POP and GMail, because GMail tracks internally whether mails have been downloaded and ignores whether they are new or not. You can force it to set all mail as new, though.
3) GMail ignores attempts to delete messages from the inbox via POP
4) Mail sent from the computer (not using the web interface) are only held in the mail program; mail sent from GMail appears in your INBOX via POP (so you can create a rule to move it to a sent mail folder or something like that).
5) I don't think GMail *has* folders to begin with, does it? So you certainly won't get that either.
Hmm ... it's a start, but doesn't quite achieve what the OP is asking for.
The problem with all POP access is that whenever you use an email program to view your email from a service like GMail or Yahoo or whatever, you have to decide to either keep or delete the messages you've read on the original service. If you've filed emails into different folders in Mail, this will be lost in GMail, even if you keep the messages there. If you delete some messages while keeping others, this too will be lost.
Keeping a true mirror of your email account whether you use an email program or webmail requires IMAP mail. I'm cynical enough to believe the only reason more webmail providers don't allow IMAP service is that they want you to use webmail full time to see the ads and so on (but maybe there's a less evil technical reason that someone else could share).
I wouldn't be surprised if more collaboration between Apple and Google were to occur in the future, and collaborating on email seems a likely candidate. In the meantime, there might be a 3rd party solution on the horizon like Spanning Sync for Google Calendar.
Clearly we're on the same wavelength
No, GMail doesn't use folders, but it does use "Labels" that mark messages for different purposes. Presumably, if someone were to develop some type of true syncing software, they could construct it so that folders in Mail matched to Labels ... but that's a lot of work.
The easiest solution depends on IMAP access ... perhaps people can start asking GMail to consider offering this type of email access and see what they say?
Yeah... I think, when Google developed GMail, their whole strategy of sort of server-based information is very important. I don't think they want their accounts managed offline in the way IMAP does. They don't want you to delete your messages, because they want Google to become the place where you can go and find an e-mail from 3 years ago without even thinking about it. Which is a thing I (and probably everyone else in this thread) has had for years using POP and IMAP and mail programs, but which many common users do not have.
Yea, its pretty cool. All of our online services are migrating to Google's services, mail, calenders, etc. We will also be able to use their document and spreadsheet programs.
I guess i will just start using Gmail instead of mail. Maybe a better solution will come out in the future.
I have found this program very useful when accessing your mail on a gmail account .http://mail.google.com/mail/help/notifier/notifier_mac.html