Saturday, July 5, 2008

E-mail joys

I resolved those e-mail woes that I was experiencing. I ended up adding all the accounts into the Gmail web interface. As long as the accounts are added in the web interface, you can set up in Apple Mail the ability to send from each of the accounts using only the one GMail account. Go to Preferences, Accounts, and in Account Information, list each e-mail address separated by a comma and a space. Then you can delete the other accounts that were already in Mail. Do this at your own risk though. If you don't archive all the messages in Inbox, Drafts, and Sent, Mail will delete them. I have an archival folder stored locally, so I just went ahead and dragged everything from those folders into the archival folder. I didn't do this for the first account that I deleted in Mail, so I had to go into Time Machine to retrieve those messages and put them back into the archive. Be sure to back up everything on Time Machine before you start to mess with any of this; I knew vaguely that some complications might arise, so I did that, and lo and behold, it was a good thing I did.

Anyway, not much changes with regard to how you have to use Mail. You can still select from where you're sending in the same way as before, but instead of the accounts being managed in Mail, they're all coming from the GMail account. This setup resolves the problem of not having access to multiple signatures for the accounts you manage in GMail, because you can do it in Mail. On the iPhone, you can't send mail from the different accounts with the one GMail account. You can't even send from GMail's default account. You can only send from the account named for the Google username. This doesn't bother me that much though, as I really only use e-mail on the iPhone to view new messages. I rarely reply on the iPhone, but if I need to, it doesn't bother me that it will be coming from the original address on GMail.

It's nice to finally be able to take advantage of that great feature of the web interface, to have it automatically reply from the account to which the incoming message was sent. It's also cool because this is IMAP, and everything synchronizes beautifully.

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