Gmail and MobileMe - Living Together in Perfect Harmony

I’ve been using Gmail for about 4 years now, and it’s pretty much become the centre of my email life, with my various email accounts being funneled into Gmail. I’ve used it with both the web client, and Mail.app on my Mac via IMAP, and have been pretty happy with both.

With the release of MobileMe and the iPhone 3G I made the decision to move to MobileMe (an Apple fanboi at heart, I wanted to keep it all within the one happy family – particularly seeing as work just bought me a MacBook Air.) But I was really reluctant to stop using Gmail as the repository of all of my email, both received and sent (awesome search, archiving and just to have a backup on another server).

It’s relatively easy to setup forwarding from Gmail through to MobileMe, which you then add to your mail client (Mail.app on the Mac) and the mail will come in as per normal. But this would mean that any sent items won’t appear in Gmail, which in turn means that Gmail is only storing half of the picture. But with adrianlynch doing most of the legwork, we were able to work out a solution.

There are quite a few little things that need to be done in order to fine tune the setup, particularly if you want to use multiple email addresses. I’ll cover those, and then get to the meat of the setup.

Multiple email addresses in Gmail.

Gmail has had the ability to support multiple email accounts for quite a while, and it all works quite well. First of all, sign into gmail, then go to the settings -> Accounts tab. The bet we’re interested in is the “Send Mail As” bit. You can add all of the email addresses you want to have gmail send email for in here. Gmail will send a confirmation email to the address you enter (just to make sure that you are in fact billg@microsoft.com).

Setting up the email forwarding

There are two ways to forward email in Gmail. One is in the Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, which will forward every message to the address you specify. The other way is via a Filter (Settings -> Filters). I prefer to use the filter, because it allows me to get rid of some of the cruft mail that I don’t really ever want to see again (eg, one of my mail accounts flags spam as *SPAM* ... if I didn’t setup a filter to not forward this, I’d receive all of those emails in MobileMe, which is sub-obptimal to say the least).

Setting up your computer

Of course, this assumes you’re using a Mac. If not, I’m sure you’re a smart enough person to work it out :)

MobileMe setup

First up, add your MobileMe account. It’s pretty simple. Just enter your MobileMe account details (same as your old .Mac account), and it should all be jake.

If you’ve setup gmail to handle multiple email addresses, enter them all in the “Email Address” field, separated by commas.

Gmail setup

Now, you need to add your gmail account to the system, as an IMAP account. Follow the instructions on the Google Help Center

Once you have added the account Mail.app will probably start downloading all of your mail from Gmail, which could take a fair while. This may or may not be something you want: your choice.

After the mail has all downloaded, go into the Advanced tab for the Gmail account in Mail.app, and uncheck “Enable this account.”

Then, go back into your MobileMe account and set the outgoing SMTP server to smtp.google.com. All of your sent mail will now go through Gmail, which is great for archiving purposes. Because MobileMe is an IMAP server, it will automatically be copied up to the MobileMe server (because it’s storing a copy in your Sent Items folder on your Mac), which means it’s then available on all the computers you use MobileMe with, including your iPhone / iPod Touch.

Why did I enter the multiple email addresses?

If you have multiple email addresses, and you entered them all in the “Email Address” box earlier, you will now have the option to choose which address to send your mail as when you create a new message.

There’s one little gotcha here, and it’s why I mentioned setting up the addresses from within gmail before. If you try to send a message from an email address that Gmail doesn’t “know” about, it will replace the sender email with your Gmail address. This is obviously to stop you spoofing your address, but it took me a little while to work that bit out. So, just make sure that you’ve defined all the addresses that you want to “Send As”

Setting up your iPhone / iPod Touch.

Once you have the above system up and working, you can basically mirror that setup on your iPhone. You need to create both accounts under “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” in the Settings application. Then disable the Gmail account, and set the outgoing SMTP server to gmail in the MobileMe setup.

Push Goodness.

If everything has gone according to plan, you should now have your Gmail “pushing” to your iPhone, and also appearing on your computer. And if you have multiple macs, and have sync turned on for “Mail Accounts” and “Mail Rules and Smart Folders”, then you will shortly have those settings on both of your computers.

But I'm not installing ANYTHING!

Nice one Adobe.

Check out the space required, particularly when I don’t have anything checked.

Ideas 4 - Lisa Herrod

Here’s the second video from Ideas 4 from last week. In this one, Lisa Herrod from Scenario Seven gives her “Usability is More Than Skin Deep” presentation.

Once again, there were a few teething issues with the camera. I framed it using Harriet as a guide, but it turns out that Lisa is a little bit taller, which means there’s a little bit of wandering camera action going on for the first minute as I play with the tripod.

It was a great night. I wished I could have hung around a little bit longer at the end, but I had to rush home (sick children and such – all is good now) so I missed out on the trip to Fast Eddies.

Can anyone say "X-Box 360"?

Xerox have revised their corporate design, which in current times means a new logo. With a new mission of course, that the obligatory new logo doesn’t say ‘Copier’

And the new logo?

Which immediately made me think of this:

As Myles Eftos said on twitter: “Nothing says ‘copier’ more than pirating someone else’s logo”

LOL.

Leopard: Mail.app gets gmail style searching

I’m going to jot down little tidbits I find while using Leopard, things that are good and things that are not so good.

I like the revised Mail.app (though judgement still reserved on the TODO’s and Notes features). One thing I have noticed is that you can now do Gmail style searches in the main search bar.

Keywords that I’ve found work so far:

from:
to:
subject:

Haven’t worked out how to do date based searches yet, and folder: or mailbox: don’t seem to work yet, but I’ll post more if I find something.

UPDATE

I found some more in the spotlight searching help file

date: eg date: yesterday or date:24/08/07
kind: eg kind: document or kind:movie (this find messages with an attachment of a particular type)

iCal Day is No More

File under mostly nerdy:

For years now, Mac faithful have “celebrated” iCal Day. The default icon for the iCal program was the 17th of July, as long as the program wasn’t running. When you started the program up, the icon would reflect the current date.

Now, with the release of Leopard Apple have updated the program so that the icon when iCal is not running has the current date.

Vale iCal Day. A short, but bright life.

Jailbreak

Got an iPod Touch? Visit jailbreakme.com in Safari on your iPod, click on the button at the bottom, wait for a bit and then boom, you’ve got root access to your iPod and you can start installing apps all over the place.

If you hunt around a bit you can get some of the apps from the iPhone that aren’t on the iPod (such as Mail.app, Google Maps, Stocks.app and Weather.app) and you can pretend like you have the convergence device you’ve always wanted.

And you get to end up with a screen like this:

So very cool.

TIP: To get Australian stocks into Stock.App, use the 3 letter ASX code for the company followed by .AX e.g. BHP.AX. Actually, that tip will also work for the Stocks widget in OSX as well.

Upgrading to Capistrano 2

For no other reason than this is something I need to remember on other projects, here is a list of the changes I made when I uninstalled deprec and upgraded to capistrano 2 for deployment.

Things to do

Do this once

then in the application directory

then remove “require ‘deprec/recipes’ from the deploy.rb file

then put the following in to the deploy.rb file

Apple TV and iTMS

With the introduction of the new iPod Touch and the addition of the iTunes Wireless Store for both the new iPod and the iPhone, does that mean that there’s an update for the AppleTV coming soon that will let us browse and purchase music/tv/movies online? Surely that’s got to be the ultimate. Sit on your couch, purchase an album and listen to it within 3 minutes, all using a remote.

Mist

Mist
Originally uploaded by Jordan Brock

So I bought a new Nokia N95. Rather sweet indeed. Apart from the 5 megapixel camera (!), the wifi, the HSDPA and the huge screen, it’s got a GPS! A freakin’ GPS. Which of course means I now walk around a lot with my phone out in my hand, looking like I’m watching a portable TV.

I got the phone through 3, mainly because of their data packages ($30 for 1GB). I’ve not really cranked it up though. A year on Telstra has made me fear doing anything other than call people … mainly because of the enormous bill that you receive at the end of the month, just for trying to check your email every now and then.

Of course, the iPhone is due for release soon (in the USA at least) but it’s over 18 months away in Australia, and unless it gets a fairly major specs upgrade in the meantime, it’s going to be one of those “nice, but only if it had … ” types of things. I mean, a 2MP camera? That’s so 2007.

Perth Sites in the Webby's

The Perth International Arts Festival website, done by the clever starfish at, um, Clever Starfish has received a nomination for Best Events Website. They are up against some big names, including the BBC, Mercedes Benz and Lollapalooza, so this is great news. Congrats to Kay and team.

And in the Honorees section for News Sites there is PerthNorg, run by Bronwen Clune. Once again it’s a fantastic site that is really pushing up against some of the established players in the market, and (I’m assuming) a fraction of the budget.

So, as someone said on twitter, “Go Team Perth!”

_Update: Cross posted at Spin Technologies

Scouta

Even though I’ve had an account for a few months, I’ve only just really started looking into Scouta, an audio and video recommendation service that was developed in Perth, and founded (in part) by Richard Giles. The basic idea is that you can watch videos/listen to music, and tag it, as well as rate it. Then based upon your voting, you get recommendations. You can also subscribe to your recommendations list via iTunes (something that I presume will work better when they release a plugin shortly!)

While I’m not exactly a fan of the design, I think the service is pretty cool, and it’s great to see them getting some recognition from the big news sites. It’s also great to see that it’s privately funded. Congrats to Richard.

Work Friendly Cafes

I recently setup a new page on Hotspotr that tracks work friendly, wifi enabled cafe’s within Perth. Check it out, and if you know a cafe where the owners don’t mind you setting up with your laptop for an hour or two, add them in.

Mechanical Turks

Recently, a computer scientist called Jim Gray went missing off the coast of the US. A search was mounted, but nothing found. Then amazon stepped in, utilising a new satellite image and their “Mechanical Turk”http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome (basically a brute force computer program that uses real people doing mindless tasks for small amounts of money).

Via TechCrunch

Robbery

In preparation for having to be able to work while in the US in December (we’re going for xmas and such … a plane trip with a 5 week old and a 2.25 year old … mmmm, fun), and I priced out a MacBook Pro. It came to AUD$4613, which is a little pricey, but hey, it’s a sweet machine.

As an experiment I went to the Apple US website, and priced the same spec machine. And what do you know? It comes to AUD$3818 at today’s exchange rate. $800 difference. Just because it’s in Australia? Even when you factor GST into it, it’s still about $400 cheaper.

So, guess what I’ll be buying in the US?