I'm still using

Me showing Monique the magic of flagging and unflagging and showing how it changes the starred / unstarred in the Gmail web interface. Photo by Duane Storey, you can buy some great photos of Vancouver from him.

I've spent this past week or so having switched to using Gmail's new IMAP interface. I had switched to using the web-only interface for perhaps the last year or so, and it worked quite well for me. POP3 doesn't cut it when you have multiple machines (laptop and home desktop) and devices (Nokia smartphone, iPhone, etc.). And that's exactly what the IMAP protocol was invented to take care: keep folders, messages, and other status (read / unread, flagged, etc.) synced across multiple devices.

I wasn't sure whether I would like going back to using a desktop email client. And it's been great. Email is fast, I can go back to having a couple of drafts open as separate windows to remind me to get to them today, and so on.

Gmail's labels become folders....with a few funky side effects, in that thinking of them more as folders rather than things you might use multiple labels for will be less confusing.

A big thing I miss: I'm so used to the Gmail search interface that I find myself typing "from:Some Name" in Mail.app's search box, rather than typing the name and then clicking the "From" button. I bet some enterprising soul could do a good job of an AppleScript or something that could change this to work Just Like Gmail Search.

OK, enough just talking about the outlines. Head over here for extended instructions on setting up Gmail IMAP for Mail.app or your iPhone, which has the excellent extra tips of "mapping" your Gmail Trash, Junk, Drafts, and Sent folders to the right folders in your local app, and everything "just works".

Those of you with iPhones (or Nokia phones or any other device that can talk IMAP to get email) will want to go this method, so you can actually quickly manage email on the go and have all those changes reflected when you get back to some other device.

Now what? Well, I need a way to sync my contacts in Gmail to my local Address Book. A Plaxo plugin already takes care of synching between machines, and the standard Bluetooth iSync syncs to mobile.

I made this post originally with Blogplanet, a Java app for mobile. It may end up being one of the few mobile apps that I actually keep around.

But what do I mean about mobile apps vs. the mobile web? Well, we talk a lot about web applications, but we usually think about a full desktop and browser supporting them. The mobile web can be thought of as being the web optimized for mobile devices, or we can think about how web-based applications should be evolving to work well with mobile devices.

Then there are mobile apps. Many of them are, indeed, written in Java for that mythical write once run anywhere, although in the mobile world it's more like write once, endlessly test, tweak, and optimize everywhere. The platform specific apps tend to be richer and more polished -- e.g. Series 60 apps for the vast variety of Symbian phones out there. ShoZu is a pretty good example, but even there, there is Seres 60 vXX where incompatibilities creep in.

So, I've been using both the mobile web and mobile apps on my new E61. And the mobile web is winning. Much of that is due to Google.

Gmail? Works great in HTML (*not* mobile) mode using the built in browser. Google Reader has a mobile friendly mode. Google Maps actually doesn't work very well / at all, and I actually used Mapquest. But, then there's a mobile app for this -- downloadable Google Maps for Mobile. Chalk one point up for mobile apps.

So why would I use Gmail instead of the built in email client? Which I could even configure with Blackberry push email? Well, one reason is that Gmail for domains is my main email, and I heavily label / sort my email. On the mobile, using POP3, it just grabs everything.  I don't see myself using the built in email client until Gmail (or another system I use) supports IMAP.

Going forward, the browser on my mobile device will, like the desktop, continue to be the most important application on there. Are you developing for mobile? Well, forget it...you're developing for the web, some of it just happens to have slightly smaller screens.

I think I just found a feature that's going to be implemented in Google Talk / Gmail real soon now: voicemail.

Try creating a label with the name "voicemail". I was cleaning up my personal account, where I get my voicemail delivered by email. I had set up a label months ago, and was trying to apply the label to one of the voicemails and got the error "The label name Voicemail is invalid". Hmmmm. So, I deleted the label, then tried to re-create it with the same name. No go...same error. Richard quickly verified that he was getting the same error.

Of course, trying to create a label with the name "Chats" gives you a different message -- "System specific names are not allowed. Please try another name." -- but it likely just means that "Voicemail" isn't truly live in the system yet.

Oh, and by the way, Bryght's switch to Gmail for domains is working really well. 

All in all, it's a good product, but all these people talking about how 30mm people are going to switch over to it must be seeing something I don't. My prediction (and I'll happily and publicly acknowledge defeat if I am misreading this) is that they will get a few million new users initially, many for a second or third address as opposed to their primary address, and that many of them won't stick with it to become active users over a longer period of time. After that, they'll grow at the same rate, with the same type of characteristics, as Yahoo, Hotmail, and other webmail providers.

Email and email addresses, unlike search engines, are pretty sticky things.

Only Once: Gmail - I Don't Get It

I archive my email locally because I have to -- my mail servers aren't big enough, and my webmail access doesn't include search. If Google offered me Gmail plus access via IMAP, I'd pay for it. Just like I'd love to pay Flickr to handle all my online photo sharing.