Gmail to iCloud to Gmail again...

I’ve used Gmail or several years and have really enjoyed the experience. It’s not without its quirks however. Anyone who has ever used Gmail with an IMAP client can attest to how wonky things can get. The way Gmail’s All Mail folder functions causes lots of duplicate messages to show up. If a message has a label it will appear in both a folder for that label as well as in the All Mail folder. If you search for a message in the client multiple copies will pop up. The Gmail experience on the iPhone is also annoying. You can setup up Gmail through IMAP just like a desktop client, with all of the duplicate messages, but you can’t get push. That means I have to set my phone to poll the network at a certain interval. This is bad for battery life at high settings and means that messages don’t show up right away. The other option is to set up Gmail though Google sync as an exchange server. You can get push with this option but deleting a message will always archive it. I don’t want to archive all the junk newsletter messages I get. To delete a message with this setup I have to select it and then manually move it to Gmail’s trash folder. ...

October 28, 2011 · 4 min · dschaaff