Sync your email accounts from anywhere.

April 27, 2008

Ever wanted to be able to sync your email on every single computer that you use instantly and yet still access your email from “public” terminals too? This is often an issue for those of us who run email clients on our personal computers (outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) but still need to access emails away from the home/office.

When working at home you make changes to your email folders, delete emails, change status and “stars”, move emails from one folder to another. This all helps you to organize and run your office efficiently. But what happens when you access your email from your friends house, from that hotel lobby, or from Spain during your business trip. Unless you carry your laptop with you everywhere, you are forced to access your email accounts through your host server’s accounts, or hot mail, or yahoo, or all of them (for those who have like 20 email account spread all around).

When you access from abroad, all those changes, deletions and more are not going to be reflected in your “home base” email client. Upon your return back to the office, you are forced to download them all again and re-read every email, once again setting status, importance, moving to folders, etc.)… Leave for a week and this can be a real nightmare.

Not anymore. Google GMail now allows IMAP synchronization with most common email clients. What does this do? It syncs your online email with your email client in every way. That means when you’re in California in the hotel lobby and you delete 10 files, add five new folders, move 50 emails into 20 different folders and send 100 emails. Upon return to your office computer your email client will immediately delete those files, add those folder, move those files etc on your own computer. And it works the other way also, so that when you access your emails in Google Gmail from anywhere, you are always getting an up to date exact replica of your email client structure.

Because Gmail gives you an unholy amount of storage (always growing too) and allows you to create POP account addresses from anywhere you can consolidate every email from every account into once place which will sync with your “base camp” computer.

I myself have 11 email accounts from four different hosting services over the past eight years, all consolidated and stored in Gmail. All perfectly synced at all times with my Thunderbird Email client. It’s heaven.

Give it a try… doesn’t cost a cent.

Posted in Hardware/Software