Pondering the best way to sync email
across devices, looks at mobile OS upgrades, and tracks down Earbuds designed
for mobile.
How many email-capable devices do you own? And
how many do you use on a regular basis? For me it's a desktop in the office, a
chunky powerhouse Windows laptop that I use at home and a more portable one
that I carry on trips, a Mac, three tablets (travel, bedside and coffee table),
and maybe four different phones that I'm testing at any one time, Now I realise
I'm not a typical user, especially since three of the phones and one of the
tablets are on loan, but I don't think it's unusual for someone to have a work
PC, a home PC, a laptop, a phone and possibly a tablet, all needing access to
the same email account. Or, more likely, multiple accounts.
There are problems, however, and they arise
not so much from sending or receiving email - most devices these days come with
brilliant clients for doing that. No, what bugs people is keeping their email
properly synced across multiple computers and handhelds. If you're still
working with POP3 (and many people are forced to), a particular incoming email
might have been downloaded on one device and deleted from the server; then, if
you want to reply to it from your phone or tablet, you’ll find it isn’t there.
Likewise, if you replied to an email a couple of weeks ago and want to refer
back to it in your Sent Items folder again, with a traditional POP3 setup -
you'll need to be on the same machine to do this. It's very messy.
There are a number of solutions, and I'll
run through several here - my list won't be comprehensive, and I'm sure some of
you will have other (probably better) ideas, so keep an eye on the website and
feel free to add a comment once this part of the column appears.
Let's start with the basics. By default,
most email clients will delete an email from a POP3 server as soon as it's been
downloaded: you'll usually find an option buried somewhere in the settings or
options, to "leave email on the server for xx days". Set that to
something like 30 days, or whatever suits your working environment, and at
least you'll receive all of your email on all of your devices. You'll need to
adjust the time period to the longest that any single device can sit on the
desk without you using it. Oh, and what's vitally important is that you need to
make this configuration change on all of your POP3 clients leave only one on
the default setting and it will kill the setup completely.
Email
everywhere
What about sent emails? How do you get
those on all of your devices? Well, it's a bit clumsy perhaps, but the simplest
way is to CC (or preferably BCC) all your emails back to yourself. In fact,
you'll be able to set many email clients to do that automatically. With others,
Outlook being an example, you can create a rule to automatically forward all
sent emails to another address, and this can be your own address, thus looping
the mails back to your own account. Unfortunately, with Outlook 2010 you can
only CC, not BCC, such emails, which isn't a massive problem but can look odd
when others see that you're CCing yourself on all of your emails. There's a way
around this using custom VB code, and perhaps that's something I'll return to
in the future.
Another option, and it's one that I see
many people recommend, is to set up a Gmail or Hotmail account and use it as an
email archive, forwarding both your inbound and outbound messages there. It
works well, but I don't really find it particularly convenient - if you're
looking for an email from a year ago, for example, but have only a vague notion
of the name of the person you were communicating with, you end up doing several
searches in two different places.
You might ask, "why not use Gmail as
your main email provider?" This is an option, especially if you use the
Apps version that enables you to use your domain name (I believe our esteemed
IDC writer Dick Pountain does this), Problems arise if you have to access and
act upon emails from multiple sources - for example, I have a mail server that
looks after personal and emails, then cst-group.com for my web agency,
demographix.com for the online survey company I help out with, plus a few more.
Most people can't force their employer or ISP to use Gmail!
There's also a potential problem over
snooping, since many people simply don't want Google to have access to all of
their emails and target them with ads and services based on the content. Sure,
you can opt out of this in the Gmail settings, but I've never seen a clear
statement from Google about whether this actually turns off the email scanning
or merely doesn't display targeted ads. For all of these reasons, Gmail and
Hotmail simply won't be viable options for many people, either as main
providers or as archives.
What about IMAP then? Surely it was
designed to address these issues? This is certainly true - with POP3 your mail
client grabs the messages and runs the mailbox locally, whereas IMAP works by
keeping your mailbox on the server, and the client software (Outlook,
Thunderbird, or whatever) simply provides a window onto that mailbox. It means
all computers see the same view, and even share the Sent Items folder. Perfect,
eh? In an ideal world it would be, but there are still a few problems. First,
despite IMAP being 26 years old this year, not every email system supports it.
Well, actually, most email systems support it, but not all mail server managers
open it up: many old- school network admins still think IMAP is a horrible new
invention.
If you look at the more popular ISPs, for
example, you'll find the majority support POP3 only for email collection - and
it isn't too difficult to understand why, since IMAP keeping all of the email
on their servers massively increases the disk space consumed. This isn't much
of a problem on a mail server in a small company with few employees, but ramp
it up to a large ISP and the costs of disk space go up considerably compared to
a P0P3-based setup.
One of the most common email environments
in Enterprise Land is Microsoft Exchange Server, and not only does ActiveSync
ensure you'll see the same view on your mobile devices as you do in Outlook
(including message read status and flags), it's also great for keeping multiple
devices in sync because, as with IMAP, the main mailbox is stored on the
server. Yes, this uses up lots of disk space, but in an Exchange environment
that's expected. There are usually size limits on an Exchange mailbox, which
will be site-dependent, but figures in the range of 200MB to 750MB are fairly
typical. Unfortunately, if you're the kind of person who likes to - or maybe
needs to - keep old emails, then even 750MB won't last long. My own email
archive, for example, takes up little over 10GB. This is fairly easy to manage
in an Exchange/Outlook environment, though, since you'll move older emails off
the server to locally held PST files on one of the connected PCs.
In fact, Outlook includes a very nice
auto-archive facility that can be set to sweep ancient emails from your
Exchange mailbox on a regular basis. What this does of course is take us right
back to square one. Much as with the old POP3 email problem, these ancient
emails will be available only from the machine that holds the PST file, so if
you're out on the road or sitting at home, and want to refer back to an email
you sent this time last year (maybe for a service or contract renewal), you
probably won't have access to that PST file. Even if you do have file-level
access to it, it will be a huge file that might take hours to copy.
There are several different solutions to
this, but one of the best I've found is a fairly cheap bit of software called
SynchPST for Outlook, from a company called Wisco: you simply point the
application at two PST files and it neatly synchronises their contents. You can
either sync the whole PST file, or maybe just a single folder or two. The first
time you run it, it will take a while, especially if you're syncing over a slow
link between home and office, but from then onwards it will run much quicker
since it only syncs changed or updated emails. Incidentally, it will sync all
Outlook data, including calendar entries and contacts. I can heartily recommend
it as a way to keep your PST files in shape.
SynchPST
is a useful tool for keeping your email in sync across multiple PCs.
The software comes in two flavours: a Home
version that probably does most of what most people need and costs $40, and a
Pro version for $30 more that can sync between Exchange servers and PST files,
work with password-protected PST files and also enables you to schedule regular
synchronisation. I use the Pro version, but for simple PST file syncing I think
you'll be fine with the Home edition.
One thing you might notice when you start
to sync PST files between different computers is that you end up with several
copies of the same email, especially if you’ve moved certain emails into
folders on one machine but not on another sync the two and you'll find copies
in both the inbox and the folder. Again, Wisco comes to the rescue with its
product NoMoreDupes, which does pretty much what it says on the tin: scanning
your mailbox for multiple copies of the same email (or contact, appointment and
so on), even if they're in different folders, and allowing you to cull the
duplicates.
Smartphone users will appreciate
NoMoreDupes too, since you often find that when you change phones you can end
up with two or more copies of your contacts and calendar entries -1 experience
this all the time when testing new handsets. NoMoreDupes clears this up nicely,
and is a snip at $30.
