ikreateit.com

So, you’ve heard of Gmail before but never checked it out? Appalled by all the options? Or are you already a GMail user but feel there’re more options that you just haven’t explored yet and that could help you use this web app more effi­ciently? Then read on.

Get­ting started

Why should you give GMail a thought and con­sider it for your email needs? You prob­a­bly already have an email client and you are fine with what they offer. All true and valid, but here are some argu­ments that con­vinced me to switch com­pletely to GMail eventually:

• 7GB — yes, that’s seven giga byte — of stor­age space! I have imported six years worth of emails and I have only 1% of my avail­able stor­age in use
• Auto­mate your email sort­ing with labels and filters
• Have all your emails, even from other accounts, at your fin­ger­tips wher­ever you are! If you are work­ing on dif­fer­ent com­put­ers, in dif­fer­ent set­tings and maybe even on dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems, that can be a life saver

If you haven’t already, set up a Gmail account. You can either start from scratch or, if you already have a Google account, you can add Gmail there. Beware: dur­ing the setup process of the lat­ter option, you have to type in your Google account pass­word and not set a new pass­word. Took me a cou­ple of tries before I real­ized that.

Once you’re done, you’ll land right in your inbox, with all the Google good­ness at your fin­ger­tips. I won’t go explain­ing every­thing that you see, but I’ll point out what you can do now to get started quickly and efficiently.

Where are the folders?

Google doesn’t have fold­ers. Yup, no kid­ding. I was as appalled by it the first time I tried it as you might be, but actu­ally it’s really not a big deal. Instead of fold­ers, GMail uses Labels. So, if you are get­ting a new email, the email will be assigned the label “Inbox” and there­fore show up in your inbox. If you have had your pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence in a folder named “pri­vate” before, all you have to do is cre­ate a label called “pri­vate” and assign it to the emails that fit the category.

Nested labels

Some­times, one cat­e­gory is not spe­cific enough to prop­erly cat­e­go­rize mails. For exam­ple, I have one label called “iKreateIt” that is applied to all my busi­ness emails since I con­duct busi­ness through iKreateIt. But I have dif­fer­ent cus­tomers and projects, which I would love to have sep­a­rated so I can bet­ter track con­ver­sa­tions. Sim­ply cre­at­ing a label called “marken­buero” (for the cor­re­spon­dence with that agency) doesn’t really do me any good since I want it neatly within the “iKreateIt” cat­e­gory. It’s busi­ness, after all.

You can solve this chal­lenge quite eas­ily: to cre­ate a sub-label or sub-category, sim­ply divide the cor­re­spond­ing cat­e­gories with a slash “/”. In my case, it would look like this: iKreateIt/markenbuero.

The best thing about this: if you use a sep­a­rate mail client with GMail, for exam­ple Apple Mail, Thun­der­bird or Post­box, the sub-labels show up as sub-folders! So, the absence of real fold­ers should really not have any impact on the way you sort your mails.

Fil­ters & auto­matic mail sorting

Before you start import­ing your email into GMail — we’ll come to that in a minute — you should also famil­iar­ize your­self with the power of Fil­ters. Fil­ters are basi­cally rules that can be applied to emails. You can auto­mat­i­cally apply labels, star it, mark it as read etc. If I get an email from my busi­ness address, a label with the name of that email address is auto­mat­i­cally applied to that email. The same goes for my pri­vate email addresses and so on.

Addi­tion­ally, I can set cer­tain key­words as the trig­ger for a label. For exam­ple, all mails that relate to a cer­tain project have the cus­tomer name or the project name some­where in them (eg. “BSG”). As soon as GMail detects that customer/project name, it will assign a label with just that name (“BSG”) and the mail will auto­mat­i­cally be cat­e­go­rized (and put into the “BSG” folder, so to speak).

Import­ing your exist­ing mails

Now we get to the tricky part that requires some plan­ning ahead. First we have to estab­lish if you have all your mails on a local desk­top hard drive within a mail appli­ca­tion or if your emails are still stored on your email provider’s server.

The first case could be if you have free pop3 accounts some­where and don’t leave your mails on the server after you have checked your inbox with your desk­top mail client. Some users also leave their emails on their pop3 accounts, run­ning into the occa­sional full mail­box. In the sec­ond case, you could have IMAP mail­boxes that allow you to man­age your email both on the server and locally and keep both loca­tions in sync.

Unfor­tu­nately there is no way of import­ing the mail on your local hard drive directly through Google in your new GMail account, but there are workarounds. Since there is a plethora of vari­a­tions for this sce­nario, I’ll just describe my setup and hope you can draw some advice for yours.

I have the fol­low­ing accounts:

• 3 x free pop3 accounts that are emp­tied every time I check with Apple Mail
• 1 x MobileMe account (pop3)
• 5 x busi­ness accounts that are used in IMAP mode

The mails from the dif­fer­ent accounts have been imported a follows:

• Exist­ing mail from the pop3 accounts has been moved into GMail via IMAP workaround (see below for details)
• All pop3 accounts, includ­ing MobileMe are being checked for new mail through GMail, which col­lects the email into its own inbox, labels it and removes it from the other servers (you can change these set­tings dur­ing setup) –> go to Set­tings — Accounts and Import — Check mail using POP3 — Add POP3 email account
• For my own con­ve­nience, I have con­verted all my IMAP emails into for­ward­ing addresses and the incom­ing mails are being sent on directly into my GMail account. You have to watch out for two things prior to these steps which I will lay out in the para­graph Things To Consider

The IMAP workaround to import exist­ing mails from your desk­top mail client

So, now that your cur­rent email is being  auto­mat­i­cally sucked into GMail, how do you get your vast masses of old emails up there (if you even want to do that)? Unfor­tu­nately, only Google Apps users have the chance to do that directly via Google. But for the rest of us there is a fairly sim­ple method that requires only a fairly fast inter­net connection.

First, go into your GMail account’s set­tings and in the tab “For­ward­ing and POP/IMAP” make sure that IMAP is enabled. Then, open up your desk­top email client where are all your exist­ing mails are stored. Add your new GMail account as an IMAP account (instruc­tions). Once done, all your GMail label will show up as fold­ers. Now, all you have to do is to drag your exist­ing emails into the cor­re­spond­ing GMail folder/label. Since the mails will be uploaded to GMail, it might take a while depend­ing on your inter­net connection.

Things to con­sider with for­ward­ing addresses

If you want to con­vert your exist­ing IMAP email addresses to for­ward­ing addresses, beware! With my provider, I have to delete the exist­ing mail account and re-add the address as a for­ward­ing account. If you delete your exist­ing IMAP address, all your data on your IMAP server with your provider will most likely be deleted as well! So, before you do any­thing, make sure you have those mails backed up or imported into GMail. You can import them directly from these online accounts into Google if you also have pop3 access.

Now, the down­side of these for­ward­ing accounts is that you can­not use them to write emails from. Yeah, that sucks. After all, I want to able to write cus­tomers from myname@iKreateIt.com and not from myname@gmail.com. Also, what if you want to write an email from those POP3 addresses which you are hav­ing so neatly imported? There’s a solu­tion for that as well!

With POP3: Sim­ply go to your GMail Set­tings –> Accounts and Import –> Send Mail As . Enter the mail address you want to use as an alias and fol­low the instructions.

With other ser­vices, like your own web­site: Make sure you have at least one func­tional email address set up with your ser­vice. For exam­ple, stuff@iKreateIt.com. That account will have a user name and a pass­word. When you add your real account (myname@iKreateIt.com) to GMail as a sender address, sim­ply use the user name and pass­word of the bogus account as ver­i­fi­ca­tion. I know it sounds weird, but it works!

And that’s it. Pretty much.

Some advice for iPhone/iPod touch users

So, now that every­thing is neatly in one place, how well does this sys­tem play with your mobile mail client on your iDe­vice? Not too well, unfor­tu­nately. For what­ever rea­son, push doesn’t work with the stan­dard GMail setup on your iPhone. There is a method that sup­pos­edly works around this (read more here), but it didn’t enable push for me, not to men­tion notifications.

For a while, I was using Box­car for noti­fi­ca­tions, but it doesn’t open the mail appli­ca­tion when a new noti­fi­ca­tion comes in (it’s a lim­i­ta­tion imposed by Apple) and it also doesn’t make push work for the native iPhone mail client (all in regard to GMail).

Even­tu­ally, I spent $1.99 for the app Gmail push and since then, I am one happy Google mail user. I receive instant push noti­fi­ca­tions when mails come in and when I tap them, the app opens the Gmail win­dow for me and I can see the inbox instantly. No hic­cups so far.