Hi. My name’s Dee and I have over twenty email addresses.
I don’t know how it happened. Well okay, I do: Time. Time and being a domain administrator multiple times over and liking to have different From: fields for different projects. And somehow, over the last decade or so, I ended up with an unfathomably large number of addresses.
On last week, for no particular reason at all, I decided to rationalise them.
It occurred to me that I really only have three identities online; this one, my nom de plume for Urban Nordica and my Really Real World self. About six-to-twelve months ago I outsourced all my domains’ email to Google Apps, but I hadn’t really been using the service any differently to the old CPanel/sendmail configuration. I still accessed every account individually via POP3 in Mail.app, basically using GMail as backup.
Then I got an iPhone. The iPhone accesses GMail accounts via IMAP, and the net result was that what I was looking at at home and what I was looking at on my phone were different; if I deleted or filed an email in Mail.app, the changes wouldn’t be reflected in GMail. Hm.
The thing about GMail is that it has good handling of external accounts; you can set a GMail account (Apps or “vanilla”) to fetch, via POP3, email from up to five other accounts. You can also set up any number of send-as addresses, the best part about which is that they can be set up to “send as” properly — that is, via an external SMTP server — as well as just spoofing From: or Reply-To:. So I took my twenty-ish accounts and rolled them up into three using a combination of POP3 and mail forwarding. I kept my ability to appear to reply from any one of said accounts, but ended up with only three places to check them from.
Then I ditched Mail.app and downloaded Mailplane, which is one of those dedicated browser-client apps that allows you to check and switch between multiple GMail accounts whilst still using the web interface.
Sometime during all this, it occurred to me that GMail can be accessed via Google Sync. Google Sync is a push email technology similar to BlackBerry. Basically, your traditional email is a polling technology; you set your mail client to check the server every x minutes to see if there’s any new data there. Push works the other way around; when the server has new data, it contacts you. It (more-or-less) solves the problem traditional email has between immediacy of access to new content versus bandwidth use on mobile devices; the sorts of people who configure email access on their smartphones probably want their mail right now yesterday do it jump!, but data charges on mobile devices caused by frequent polling can be a pain. Not to mention polling on frequent short intervals when there might not actually be any content to poll doesn’t exactly make a great deal of sense.
So anyway, I set up Google Sync. I’ve had an Exchange push account connected to my iPhone in the past, and I can happily say the experience is more-or-less the same. Push email works great. No more waiting fifteen minutes between polls; if I get no emails in a day, I do no polling. If I get five emails in fifteen minutes, it trills at me for each one. Not to mention Google’s filters get applied to mail before it gets pushed, so anything that I’ve set to auto-archive (HTTP error and cron notifications, mostly) doesn’t bother me.
Google Sync also does calendaring and contacts information, so I set up syncing for those in iCal and Address Book. These are the two areas that need, I think, a little improvement. I’m having a problem with repeating events in Google Calendar not giving me reminder notices, for example, and there’s something in the Google Contacts/Address Book/BeejiveIM triangle that’s not playing nice. Still, it’s a pretty damn good solution.
The net result — and the whole point of doing this, really — is that I now have enterprise-level parity of email, calendering and contact information from three locations; my iPhone, the thick clients on my laptop and the Google web interfaces. And setting it up was all free; screw you, overly expensive Exchange licencing fees and weird BlackBerry RIM email routing!
The ironic thing? I don’t actually do a lot of communication via email these days.
C’est la vie.
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