thoughtstart

Oh, what a clusterfuck I got by mixing the iPhone, webmail and POP access.Got me a little iPhone and hooked it up with few email accounts. Gmail, which I had and love. Yahoo! Mail Plus, because it’s the only push mail that works with the iPhone, at least for now. And a regular ol’ IMAP account, because it’s like, you know, sane.Now, when I am on the go or just futzing around with the iPhone, I do my mail on it. When at work, I occasionally get on webmail. At home, on the PowerBook, I totally dig Mail.app for speed. Not all that exotic, is it? Last, Mail.app downloads email from all three accounts to back them up and expose them to Spotlight. I do go back and refer to older emails quite often.So, let’s read some mail. On the IMAP account, pure bliss, only need to process a message once. Yahoo! plays nicely within the iPhone - Yahoo! Mail duet, since the iPhone somehow syncs up with the mail directory. Bring POP access into the mix however and now all messages retrieved via POP will show as unread in Mail.app. Gmail gets one better: messages already read on the iPhone show as unread in both webmail and Mail.app, since now both iPhone and Mail.app use POP. We knew this; this is POP .Moving on to sent messages. The whole thing turns mind boggling. Let’s look at these charts to see where a sent message actually shows up. Please keep in mind that the scope is to assess the status quo - default options including recent: mode in iPhone’s Gmail and no filters anywhere (which the iPhone lacks anyway).New message, sent from iPhone:New message, sent from webmail:And, finally, new message sent from Mail.app:Naturally, IMAP shows how things should work. And, with the exception of iPhone not supporting IDLE, it is just perfect. Yahoo! once again works nicely iPhone to webmail and viceversa. However, it isolates Mail.app into a silo from where it doesn’t see or is not seen by any other client. The Gmail fun and joy continues. With recent: mode turned ON on the iPhone, the default, messages sent from either iPhone, webmail or Mail.app also show in the iPhone’s Inbox as new messages.Where on the receiving side it’s just more work handling every message several times, the charts show that dealing with sent messages is just insane. So, where is that message I sent last week using either Gmail or Yahoo!? Did I send it from the PowerBook or the iPhone? Or, was I using the browser?The iPhone is still a great device and I love it with all this insanity. If anything, this rant isn’t against the iPhone but POP and its limitations when used with multiple email clients. And, even more so, against all email providers not offering IMAP. While POP works well when using a single device, beyond the simplest setup the party is quickly over. So what’s it going to be? Give up on Mail.app and POP? Pipe Gmail and Yahoo to IMAP? Use forwarding and filters to put things right? I’m still looking into it.How are you managing email? Am I alone thinking this is just too much work? If you would like to share, please let me know in the comments.