Syncing Gmail, MobileMe, OSX and an iPhone
This week Google released an Exchange syncing option for many phones, including my adored and well used iPhone. I haven’t jumped in to use their solution yet because my own frankensync(tm) setup has been working very well now for several months and as of today Google is still not offering a push email option.
To keep it straight in my head actually takes a little thinking sometimes so I thought I’d write it down.
Since at least the 2.2 iPhone update MobileMe has been performing very well. Contacts and multiple Calendars have synced flawlessly and even the push email notification has been solidly reliable. Which is to say that I have been very happy with Apple’s sync/cloud service.
So yes MobileMe keeps my Contacts and Calendar in sync online at me.com, on my iPhone and within iCal and Address Book on my iMac. My me.com email is also kept in harmony via the Mail.app, online and the iPhone, using typical IMAP protocols. More on the email setup below.
But Google is where I really live and work and after a little bit of effort I’ve gotten everything to play nicely. The key element in my syncing setup is my iMac where an application called Spanning Sync keeps my Google calendars synced with iCal; changes made locally or online at Google are detected and updated by Spanning Sync then the MobileMe utility carries iCal updates out to the web and iPhone.
Syncing Contacts locally is actually a little easier now that Apple’s Address Book supports syncing with Google Contacts. Again changes are made locally or online and are quickly picked up by MobileMe when it does it’s update cycle.
Email is a little different using IMAP locally in Mail.app for both MobileMe and Gmail. Google nicely allows you to forward out all email and that’s what I do, sending everything over to my me.com address so that I can take advantage of Apple’s push to device option. This is actually not ideal because items marked as read on my iPhone have to be remarked in my Gmail account. Also in order to have email sent from my iPhone appear to be sent from @gmail.com the setup for outgoing email on the phone uses gmail’s SMTP server rather then the supplied me.com address. I wrote about doing that some time ago here.
It’s possible that when Google adds push email to their sync setup that I will rethink how I sync, possibly even ditiching MobileMe completly but for now I am sticking with things as I have them. I have been considering adding back syncing everything over to my home Windows machine but as it usually stills idle and off these days there has been no pressing need.
In Sync Summary:
Local-> Address Book (native sync), iCal (Spanning Sync), Mail.app (IMAP)
Online-> MobileMe (Contacts, Calendar, Mail), Gmail (Contacts, Calendar, Mail)
iPhone-> Push Email via MobleMe with a Gmail Forward and SMTP
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