This past week Google/Gmail added IMAP to their product, and that caused me to revisit what service to use as my main email, especially in view of iPhone support. [cue the wavy-lines “way-back machine” music] I think I was actually kind’a late coming into the world of cellphones, not getting my first phone until late 2001 thanks to a gift-card from an ex-girlfriend. Once I did I couldn’t imagine being without one. Same thing once I started getting email on my phone. It was on a Sprint Treo 300, using the horrible “Blaze” browser. I basically used it just to tell me if I had an email message because it was so slow and couldn’t render anything with any graphic image. Doable but painful, it got no better when I upgraded to the Treo 650 with Verizon. Thus, I had very high hopes when I got my iPhone last June. This time the problem was which mail account to use: Gmail, Yahoo or dot.Mac?

I’ve had a YahooMail-Plus account for years and had high hopes for the highly promoted “Push” mail. After pursuing this for several weeks, and creating a special “iPhone” specific” account, i never could get the whole “Push” thing to work. Damn. Well, Gmail had been my main account for some time anyway so it was the natural next choice.

My first run with Gmail was before they went IMAP and so I ran into the whole problem of having some of my mail downloaded to my macbook and some to my iPhone and i didn’t really trust the whole syncing between the two.Then I found that for whatever reason when I tried to email my photos or notes from the iPhone they didn’t get sent, definitely not good because the only way to get notes off the phone was via email. Ack. Enter the largely ignored dot.mac account to save the day.

I really loved my free iTools email account back in the day (circa 2000) and kept it even when Steve Jobs made me pay for it. Then the account largely fell into obscurity, continually running the risk of being cancelled until the unrealized promise of iWeb saved it. Surprise, surprise, when I switched from gmail to dot.mac not only did my photos and notes go through, but any organizing, writing or sending done on the iPhone would be reflected when I checked my email on my MacBook Pro. Everything worked perfectly, seamlessly and consistently. Then Google went and announced that they were now offering gmail with IMAP. Ack.

So what’s this IMAP and why does he think that he’s such a big shot? Most folks getting email use a service called POP where they start up their email program and it goes out to the Internet and downloads the waiting email onto the user’s computer (usually then erasing it from the mail server). All of this is usually done without notice or fanfare. The deal is, when one goes from only checking one’s email on ones trusty-dusty home computer to checking the email on several devices, including an iPhone, if one is using POP, the mail gets scattered among the devices. It’s like if the US mail were continually delivered over the course of the day and ones kids periodically went out to check to see if they got anything. They’d grab what was there and bring it in, but it might end up in their bedroom or in the garage or in the kitchen, or in the bathroom under a stack of magazines. Things would quickly become disorganized. So the big deal with IMAP is that the mail stays on the server but acts like it’s stored locally, so no matter what device you use to check your mail it looks the same and anything you view, respond to or throw away looks the same on your other devices or computer. If you’re a folder person who like to put your stored email in folders you can still do that and that organization is kept no matter what device you use to check your mail. For most, such things probably aren’t a big deal until you imagine all your mail scattered all over your house by your well-meaning kids.

So gmail + IMAP... because gmail uses “labels” instead of folders there were some quirkiness to how things were stored. Then there was the problem of sending photos or notes from my iPhone, Damn. That was kind of a deal killer for me. The notes function on the iPhone becomes completely pointless without the ability to mail them to my mbp. Ack. Back to my trusty dot.mac account I went after a bit over a week. Oh well, no big deal. It just works better with dot.mac than gmail. Who’d a guessed? JBB

Music: Dancing With Danger from the album “Dancing With Danger” by Sam Phillips