Notes and To Dos with Mail.app and GMail
Recently, GMail allowed users to access their mail using IMAP. Internet Message Access Protocol, or IMAP, will sync mail messages between the client and server.
Currently my POP mail is sent to my GMail account so all my email will sync with my Mail.app and iPhone! In the new Leopard Mail, you can now write Notes and To-Dos. If you have IMAP set up, those Notes and To Dos will also sync up with your IMAP (GMail) account.
In this new version of Mail, Notes will normally appear in your inbox. If you set up IMAP with Mail, your Notes will appear as messages from yourself in your inbox on your server (in my case, Gmail) and in Mail.app. If you set up Gmail IMAP on your iPhone, Notes will appear as read messages in your mail inbox. Too bad note syncing on the iPhone didn’t work out this time around. But Notes in my email gets the job done for now.
To-Dos are a different story, and sadly, somewhat disappointing. When I go into my Gmail account, the To-Dos that I wrote appear in the “All Mail” section (not the inbox) and are labeled as “Apple Mail To-Do”. Here’s what the syntax of a To Do looks like:
Looks a bit messy to me, but perhaps I’m spoiled by the cleanliness of the Mac. I would have preferred my To-Dos to also appear in my inbox. All in all, it’s a cool little feature that I’ll be using in the future. Have you had any luck with Gmail IMAP and Mail.app? Let us know!
I love the new IMAP feature Gmail offers and I certainly will use this little tip…however there are still some things that are very weird…for example every auto save in Mail gets recorded so in the browser gmail I have like 6 reply messages beneath the original email I have replied to…this is very annoying because the conversation feature that I liked so much about gmail gets somehow messy and user unfriendly…I hope that Google will somehow fix these kinds of little bugs soon…other than that I really beleive Gmail is the best free mail provider out there.
You can also consider entering your notes into the Note field of a contact and name this one maybe A-Note or something. Then you can sync your mac to the iphone.