iOS Mail for multiple email accounts with Gmail

The setup

• You use two email addresses: you@a.com and you@b.com.
• All incoming email to both addresses is forwarded to your Gmail account: you@gmail.com.
• You setup Gmail to be able to send messages as either you@a.com or you@b.com.

With this setup, all your email arrives in a unique Gmail account, which can also access through IMAP. When creating a new message in the Gmail web app, you can choose which email should be used as the from address (either you@a.com or you@b.com). When responding to a message, Gmail automatically preselects the address the message you are responding to was sent to, and allows you to override that choice. So far so good.

The problem

The only trouble with this setup is when using Gmail's mobile interface, in particular on the iPhone/iOS. The mobile interface behaves as the desktop interface, except it doesn't allow you to change the from address. When sending a new message, it is always sent from your default email (say you@a.com), which means you can't send a new message from you@b.com. Also, you can't override the email chosen by Gmail when responding to messages.

1. iOS Mail only supports one email per account (unlike the OS X Mail.app) – If you want two email addresses, you'll need two incoming IMAP or POP servers. You can work around this by setting up a Dummy IMAP server as follows:

   • Account 1: you@a.com, Unique (real) IMAP, SMTP A.
   • Account 2: you@b.com, Dummy IMAP, SMTP B.

2. When sending an email, you want a copy saved in your Sent folder on your (Unique) IMAP server. You can set this up for you@a.com. But what about you@b.com? Storing outgoing email on Dummy IMAP isn't what you want. You can use the BCC functionality of Mail, and have Mail BCC you@b.com every time you send an email with that address. Unfortunately, at least for those of us using Gmail to handle their email you@b.com, Gmail doesn't seem to be able to forward incoming mail from and to you@b.com, maybe because it doesn't consider it as incoming mail but as sent mail. So you can't forward those BCC to you@gmail.com, to have them end up in the Sent folder of your unique IMAP server.

Conclusion

When using Mail, with the best possible setup, you can't get the emails sent from one of your emails to end up on your unique IMAP server. Unless controlling what email is used when sending message is paramount to you, and you are fine with, on a regular basis, using a desktop mail client to move the Sent messages from Dummy IMAP to Unique IMAP, you are better off using the Gmail mobile web app.

Hopefully, one day, Google will add the ability for you to select the from email address in their mobile web app, as they already do in their desktop web app: we'll look back, and laugh at how complex it used to be, int the old days, to setup that old iOS Mail.

Gmail IMAP + Apple Mail + lots of messages = Constant disk activity

January 21, 2009 – See update at the bottom for a solution to this issue.

I am a long time Gmail user, but have started using Apple Mail with Gmail over IMAP just a few weeks ago. Lately I noticed that:

1. The disk activity is almost constant while Mail is running.
2. Mail is constantly synchronizing and downloading messages from the
   server.
   

The almost constant disk activity is the most annoying issue, as all the applications feel sluggish when Mail is heavily using the disk, as if the machine was swapping. I can see the constant activity of Mail with fs_usage -w -f filesys Mail.

Message synchronization is causing lots of downstream network traffic (constantly about 20-30 KB/s). As annoying as this is, with a pretty good connection, this level of network traffic doesn't have as much immediate impact as heavy disk activity.

A few data points:

• My All Mail contains more than 110,000 messages, about 2.4 GB or 35% of the Gmail quota.
  
• My ~/Library/Mail folder weighs a little more than 5 GB.

I haven't found any good solution to this issue yet. If you also have this problem, here a couple of workarounds:

• Exit Mail when you are not using it. (I had to state the obvious.)
• To avoid exiting and starting Mail, you can stop the process and resume it. To stop it run killall -STOP Mail, to resume it run killall -CONT Mail. Some applications don't like being stopped and resumed; I haven't noticed any negative side effects with Mail, but use this at your own risk.
  

And of course, if you have a hint or advise, please post a comment here. I will make sure to update this post if I hear about a solution.

A Solution

Go to the Mail.app preferences. Under Accounts, go the Advanced tab. Then, in the Keep copies of messages for offline viewing drop-down, select Only message I've read.

This will drastically cut on the amount of data that Mail.app stores locally, and it solved the slowness, high disk activity, and hanging issues I had with Mail.app. Of course, this method has a few downsides:

• You won't be able to use Spotlight to search through the body of your messages. (Which is fine for me, as I found Spotlight to create other performance problems, and I had it disabled anyway.)
• You won't be able to access some of your emails when offline. (The next time you do email on a flight, you might find that some emails you haven't already read have not been downloaded.)
• Mail.app will only download the body of a new message when you click on it, which adds a little lag. (Before, Mail.app was downloading new messages in the background, so when you were clicking on a new message, that message was already there and no network activity was necessary to show the message. Ideally, I'd like to tell Mail.app "only download messages that arrive in my inbox".)

Online Advertisement: How Can It Make So Much Money?

I am consistently amazed by how much money is being made through online advertisement.

• Question: How much money do you think Google or Yahoo is making per search?

• Answer: According to TechCrunch, it is 9 cents for Google and 4 cents for Yahoo.

This is much more than most of the people I have talked with would have expected. And frankly, I find it hard to comprehend how this amount can be so high. As far as I can remember, I can't recall ever clicking on an advertisement shown by Google search. Granted, most people out there are not using the Web the way my friends and I do. But still, 9 cents per search?!

This is for search. Now let's look at blogs. Russ has been documenting how much he has been making through advertisement on his blog. Recently he mentioned that when his blog had 10,000 page views per day he was making about $100 per day with Google AdSense. That gets you to 1 cent per page view. 1 cent isn't as good as 9, and evidently searches are easier to monetize than page views on a blog, but this is still pretty darn good. Surprisingly so.

* That tells you how good Google is compared to Yahoo at picking the right advertisements.

Google Drive (GDrive) Coming Soon

I have been surprised to see how quickly the free storage capacity on Gmail has been increased during the last few month of 2007. Wikipedia has some numbers for us:

On 12 October 2007, Google ramped up the storage counter to 5.37 MB per hour. Approximately a week later, the counter went back down to 1.12 MB per hour. This adds up to about 806 MB per month or over 9.8 GB per year. From 4 January 2008, the counter went back down to about 3.35 MB per day.

While some people will end up using a significant portion of this space, most people, even power users, won't. So what is the point of increasing the storage capacity to those level? Maybe Google is just doing it because they can. I will be optimistic here and predict that Google is drastically ramping up their storage infrastructure to get ready for a new file storage service, often referred to as Google Drive or GDrive, that they are planning to launch later this year.

Google Sites: Competition to Basecamp

I have been writing on how much the newly announced Google Sites looks like a potential competitor to 37 signal's Basecamp. This looks to be even more the case reading from the notes Andrew Miller took during a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston (emphasis mine):

Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

Google Apps is currently priced per user, which works well for intranets. But it won't for an extranet collaboration tool: you don't want to have to pay something extract for each additional person who has access to the site. Basecamp charges by project, which makes sense. Let's see how Google reconciles Google Apps per-user pricing model with the per-site or per-project pricing model that makes more sense for extranets.

Terrain in Google Maps

I have been wishing for Google to add topo maps to Google Maps. That hasn't happened yet, but we are getting closer with the addition of a terrain layer to Google Maps. Sweet!

Now Google, what about about a real topo maps layer? I would think this shouldn't be a big deal, especially in the U.S. where the data is provided for free by the USGS. If Microsoft can do it (see an example on TerraServer), shouldn't Google be able to do it as well?

Google, Online Collaboration, JotSpot, and Basecamp

Google will be soon launching a new service, Google Sites, based on their acquisition of JotSpot. This will make Google's online collaboration offering for businesses even stronger.

The word on the street for some time has been that Google is the new Microsoft. If Google doesn't already compete with you today, they sure will tomorrow. Talking about online collaboration tools, should 37signals be worried? At Orbeon we are using Basecamp; we have found it to be a great tool, but have been disappointed to the lake of improvements to Basecamp during the last couple of years. Come on guys, it is time for a major update to Basecamp, or others (yes, Google) will soon be providing a more complete and more competitive offering.

Spam on Blogger, Damned Spam

Google is doing a great job dealing with spam on Gmail, but not so much on Blogger. I used to get spam in comments very rarely, but a few weeks ago it increased to 1 or 2 day, and for the last few days I started seeing tens of spam comments per day. Deleting each one of them requires a few clicks. This is quite a pain, so starting now, you will need to login with Blogger before you can post a comment.

Hint to the Blogger team: what about requiring those who are not logged in to enter a Captcha, like everyone else is doing out there?

Update Nov 7, 2007 - Olivier noted in a comment below that Blogger already implements a Captcha. They call this word verification, and your blog is on Blogger, you can enable it under Settings / Comments. Very nice indeed. And now anonymous comments are enabled again!

Bookmark emails with Gmail

Google started rolling out their updated user interface for Gmail a few days ago. The changes are subtle, there is no eye-candy (à la Vista or Leopard), but it's all great stuff.

Here is my favorite: when you open an email, Gmail adds a fragment identifier to the URL. Now you can bookmark this URL, or copy it somewhere and reopen it later to get exactly to that message.

You could get to the same result before by opening the email in a new window, but it was much slower and not as straightforward. I love it!

Now we can have conversations on Blogger

Very nice: I noticed today that Blogger added checkbox for you to be notified of follow-up comments to a post you are commenting on.

In the past you had to use a tracking tool like coComment or co.mments to keep track of follow-up comments to posts you are commenting on. But most people aren't using any of those tools, and comments most were a fire and forget thing.

Now we'll be able to have real conversations in Blogger comments. You'll find more about this new feature, in the "official Blogger blog": Blogger Buzz.

Folders with spaces buggy in Google Reader

Update Nov 1, 2007 - This issue has now fixed by the Google Reader team. Thank you guys!

Don't use spaces in the name of your folders in Google Reader. If you do, those folders will always show up as empty in the mobile version of Google Reader. It's one of those bugs which is easy to get around to once you know about it.

And on the topic of Google Reader folders, have you noticed how those are called tags in the mobile interface? Gmail calls those labels. Google seems utterly confused and doesn't know of something should be called a folder, a tag, or a label. Google, let me tell you, for everyone out there:

• Those are called tags if an item can be associated with more than one tag. Because in real life, you can put multiple tags on an item.
  
• Those are called folders if an item can be in at most one folder. Because in real life, you can't file a document in more than one folder at a time (if you don't take hierarchies into account).

Gmail Mobile Missing "Report Spam" on the iPhone

I mentioned yesterday that the Gmail Mobile site was improved to expose more of the functionality you get in the full HTML version. I loved the Report Spam button, which you can use to quickly report all the checked messages as spam. But this morning, I notice that this button is gone:
But is seems to be only gone from the interface when you access it from the iPhone. Access the same site from a desktop browser (or another mobile browser), and you will get a slightly different UI with the Report Spam button:

So Gmail seems to be serving a different page for iPhone users. Nothing wrong with that, but please, provide at least the same amount of functionality in the pages you build for the iPhone as in the pages built for other devices!

Gmail Mobile Improved

Great news for those of us who are using the Gmail Mobile site: the site has been revamped and the changes became visible to me this morning:

• You can now select messages and perform an action on those messages (for instance mark as spam). Previously you could not mark a message as spam from Gmail Mobile. Instead, you had to click on every single message and then click on Trash message. This was slow, and still not equivalent to marking as spam.
  
• Pages have been changed slightly to take into account those of us using a tap interface (think: iPhone). Previously the action Archive was so close to Forward and Mark unread that hitting the right action required some skill. Now some space have been added between those links, which makes Gmail Mobile much more usable.

This is some great news for those of us who want to access Gmail from our iPhone. I am thrilled! It still isn't as good as the actual Gmail Mobile application (which I used to run on my Nokia E62, and which runs on most phones where you can install applications), but this is a very nice step in the right direction.

Google Reader's Search Field

Gérard mentioned a few weeks ago that Google Reader doesn't have a search field. I didn't believe him! So I had to go check for myself. But Gérard was right: there was not search field in sight, and I couldn't find anything about this on their help pages. Can you believe that?

A few days ago Google added a search field to Google Reader. Woo-hoo! Now Google Reader is back in the race, and I can now seriously consider a switch from the excellent rssfwd+Gmail combination to Google Reader.