What’s the right “user’s model” of how email works on multiple devices that are synced together? That is, which elements of interacting with email can be common on all the devices, and which elements are independent?
I have three email accounts, one of them at iCloud and two with my ISP. And, I access them using the Apple mail applications on a Mac, an iPad, an iPhone, and also access them using PCs through web pages. Reading and writing emails works in all the different combinations.
What I’m interested in more is the second tier of interactions, like how junk mail is handled. I have this set up just the way I like on the Mac but these details don’t seem to propagate to the other devices. I think this would entail some record of what mail I have marked as junk, probably a list of senders whom I’ve so treated, and also details like how long to retain them in the Junk folder and whether to delete them then or what.
And I could set up folders and have rules that aim certain things into certain folders, and I could have the system send me a notification if I get an email from certain important senders, and various other things like that.
But, I don’t really know how to think about all this. Should I think of every device as an island universe at this level of detail, or should I look for some option someplace to have everybody inherit behavior from one master, or what?
Synced email usually runs through something called MAPI. You can think of it as just a few file folders in the cloud which are shared between the devices. There’s an in-box, an out-box, a sent items, a junk mail, and then whatever other folders you define. And they’re kept synced between devices. That’s it.
There is no provision for syncing junk mail rules, spell check, filing or tagging rules, or any of the other advanced features we expect in email clients. The one area that’s possibly common is spam filtering. Some of that is done by the ISP hosting the mailbox. Once the ISP flags a piece of mail as spam, none of the devices will ever see it in the in-basket. The ISP will either disappear the mail completely before you can see it or will place it in the MAPI junk mail folder. Depending on your client settings, you may never see that folder on your device. So that’s MAPI.
Any spam filtering done on the client is independent of the process I just described and will generally be different for each client app on each device in each ecosystem. Usually the folder on your device labeled spam or junk is a different entity than the MAPI junk mail folder.
Now *some *email clients have *some *ways to sync *some *of that stuff alongside the MAPI system. But by and large that’s only possible within a homogenous ecosystem. e.g. MS Outlook of the same version on a Win tablet, a WinPhone and a PC can play together more completely than can iPad, the iCloud, a PC, and an Android phone each using a different email app. The latter are stuck with plain Jane MAPI shared folders as the sole means of communication.
My various email accounts are accessed with IMAP instead of POP. I generally leave the email on the server. If I move and email into a folder on one device it is move to that folder on the server and it gets replicated to all the devices I use.
In outlook you can setup local folders that exist only on local computer. I would think that the mac email program has similar functionality. You want to make sure that you are not using local folders for your sorting but instead are using folders that exist on the server. If you do that then the other devices will see the sorting you do on the mac.
MAPI appears to be a Microsoft solution for talking between Exchange and Outlook, etc. IMAP is the more universal email protocol, and probably the more relevant one here.
Napier, this is one of those cases where cloud mail would make the most – i.e., switch to use Gmail (my recommendation) or Apple mail (don’t know how well it works) exclusively, and dump the ISP email addresses if you can or else just fetch them from the webmail if you can’t get rid of them altogether. Otherwise, like LSLguy said, it’s a mess.
Gmail is really good at device agnosticism. All the processing happens on Google servers, so if you mark something as spam in one place, no other device will even see it. If you mark something as read, all your devices know it’s read. If you set a filter, that filter exists on Google’s servers and takes effect as soon as an email arrives at Google’s servers, independently of the devices you use. IMAP doesn’t work that way and relies on client-specific processing, which means you’d have to configure it per device for any sort of filtering you want to do.
Soooo… long story short: Switch to Gmail* altogether, ditching other email addresses if you’re willing. If you’re not, have Gmail fetch your other email accounts and dump them into your Gmail for you, and then set your devices up to connect only to your Gmail inbox instead of the individual email providers. Then everything will be centralized in one place, regardless of devices. You can also set it up so that you still send-from and reply-to your other email addresses, even through Gmail.
FWIW, I use IMAP to manage my email on 4 devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Desktop).
I have multiple IMAP accounts, and it works pretty well.
The best thing is being able to look at messages sent from one device on another one.
IMAP has rudimentary syncing, but Gmail does a whole lot more (like conversation views on all your devices), labels instead of folders, auto-filters, etc. Not to bash on IMAP, it’s just that it’s pretty limited in functionality and you shouldn’t have to tinker with that unless your workplace demands it. The consumer webmail solutions are generally more powerful, more straightforward, and easier to configure.
Its not that you get this magic “just by using a gmail address”.
A gmail specific program (write by or for gmail specifically) may be able to sync the users new anti-spam rules back to gmail server.
The anti-spam rules set by the big webmail systems (hotmail,gmail, yahoo) also apply to the email downloaded by IMAP or POP… as they are processed at the time the email is received … Should be true of gmail and hotmail.com (aka live.comoutlook.com and other microsoft names) servers… But the Webmail programs of a smaller , eg an ISP or web host, may do anti-spam only inside the webmail software (not at the mail server…)
The anti-spam rule in your email program cannot be sync’d back to the server by IMAP or POP3, these protocols do not provide a way to do rule syncing.
For what it’s worth, I use the gmail solution myself, and it was the only solution that did everything I wanted. I have multiple email addresses, and I forward them all to my gmail address. I’ve set gmail up to use a specific address for the outgoing “From:” address on new emails I write and to use the inbound address on replies (override-able on the fly, of course), so if someone only uses address B, they’ll only see address B when I reply.
I turned off all spam filtering at the incoming addresses and let gmail’s filter do the work. Then, on my multiple devices, I either use gmail.com directly or an appropriate app (either the built-in mail app on iDevices or the gmail app). Spam folders, sent-mail folders, etc., appear uniformly across devices since it’s all gmail under the hood.
This is actually kind of the point. Gmail imposes a new (I hate this word) paradigm in email. It moves consumers away from this whole “I need a mail server, protocol, and client” mindset to “I just use Gmail”. In Googleland, you’re taught not to connect to Gmail via any specific protocol or email client, but to “just use Gmail” through a website or an app.
Gmail is not just a replacement mail server, it is a mail ecosystem that you live inside, replacing old-fashioned email altogether. There are no messages, there are conversations. There are no folders, there are tags/labels. The filtering isn’t just about spam, but auto-organization, auto-labeling, auto-responding, whatever. If you’re cool with giving Google (or maybe Apple, for their offering) this much control, the end product works much better than IMAP or POP3. They control the entire user experience from the moment your email arrives to the way it’s delivered to your screen, unlike Eudora, Thunderbird, and Outlook.
Arguing about protocols is missing the point: With Gmail, you don’t worry about that. Your emails just live in the cloud forever and every device is just always synced, automatically, with no configuration. I can see an email notification on my watch, read it on my phone, start typing it on my tablet and then finish it on my laptop, with no fancy syncing setup required. It’s designed from the ground up to be seamlessly transportable between devices.
So? Algorithms read my email for keywords. Big deal? Algorithms read your mail too, for spam or for watchlisted content. The ads are arguably less intrusive than the government spying that already happens no matter which provider I use. And AdBlock easily filters the ads. And Gmail doesn’t serve you ads on its apps, on the mobile website, or through institutional (corporate/educational) Gmail. I would gladly pay for Gmail if they offered it as an option. It is so far ahead of any other email solution it’s easily worth the money. They’re still innovating, too, unlike the offline email clients limited to archaic POP and IMAP functionality.
I agree you’ve done a very nice description of how to think about Gmail and to a lesser extent the other guys’ cloud offerings. And paradigm shift is an appropriate term here, despite how often it’s overused to simply describe vNext of some banal app.
But how well does this new paradigm work when you’re offline? I read and write a lot of my mails that way.
Web email is much less functional that a decent email client. A decent email client lets you preview the emails easily has easy to use preview mode, allows you to easily have multiple emails open and visible at the same time. Has good editing tools. has the ability to sort email by date by subject by who it is from. It lets you easily scroll through more than 50 emails without reloading a page. The list goes on and on.
Google has done a good job in implementing a usable web interface to email but to claim it is better than outlook or thunderbird or even Eudora which has not been updated for years or pretty much any dedicated email client is silly.
It works very well offline. Gmail downloads (gets pushed to you) new mail and prioritized labels (stars, etc.) for you to read and write offline. It syncs your outbox, drafts and everything else whenever it connects. Offline mode is available with native Gmail mobile apps, or in your browser with the Gmail app for Chrome.
I don’t want to stray too far into IMHO/GD territory with a “webmail vs client” discussion, since the OP was about using across devices (something that Gmail is exceptionally good at).
But to briefly answer some of your points:
[ul]
[li]Previews, multiple messages open: Yeah, standalone clients are still better for that. [/li][li]Editing: Works fine and has most of the rich content you need (bold, links, images, etc.). If you need richer HTML than what the default editor offers you’re better off linking to an external HTML page anyway because not everyone reads their email in HTML-friendly reader, and people who write HTML emails don’t tend to make them responsive/phone-friendly[/li][li]Sorting email: If you’re sorting your emails and looking through 50 pages, you’re doing something wrong… or at least very old-fashioned. Another paradigm Gmail imposes, like it or not, is “search, not sort”. I’ve yet to not find anything within a few seconds using their search, whether it’s title, subject, filename, or whatever with their super-fast, indexed search over half a decade and 30,000 mail messages.[/li][li]Reloading: You don’t reload Gmail, you just load whatever messages you’re looking for on demand. The interface is loaded once in the beginning and the actual content is just AJAX-ed to you on the fly. And the Gmail apps automatically sync the messages so you can read them immediately, not needing to download them. You CAN, if you really want to, tell it to download all your messages, ever, but what’s the point?[/li][/ul]
Syncing email across devices works fine with IMAP. It has worked fine for years and years. I do it across different mobile devices. Work I do in one device shows up there in the other devices.
Editing email in gmail is not fine. you cannot easily search in the email you are composing. You are searching in the entire web page not just the corner where the email compose window is. Even when you expand the email so it is taking up most of the page this is still an issue. It is a decent web based editor but it is not comparable to any dedicated client.
You know the saying… if you’re not paying for the service, you are the product. They are always tracking you. Your emails, your browsing habits, your purchases, your phone calls, your text messages, your IMs… whatever you choose to give them. Millions of people find this an acceptable tradeoff for the services they give you. Only you can decide if it’s worthwhile to you.
For what it’s worth, if you’re American or Western European, privacy is a pure fantasy anyway. Google just wants to show you relevant ads – so far that’s about the extent of their privacy violation. American agencies snoop the emails of all users across all providers, so it doesn’t matter who you use. Elsewhere, if you happen to be an activist or some sort of malcontent citizen of another country, Google does pass over your data to the authorities (but almost all providers do so).