[Dignan17]

Greetings! I'm new to CB and new to the Blackberry in general, having gotten my first one this past Saturday (a Curve 8310 on ATT).

I really like the phone, but have been extremely disappointed in its ability to work with GMail.

Initially, the folks at the ATT store set me up with POP3 push email using my GMail account. Naturally this worked quite well, but I did not want to have to mark messages as read on both GMail and my blackberry, so I decided to try IMAP. IMAP is terrible. Yes, I get messages instantly, but everything else about it is dog slow and glitchy. Reconciliation is either slow or simply doesn't behave the way I would expect.

The thing that really confuses me is that before this I had a very basic non-smartphone (the Sony Ericsson W580i) that would do IMAP for GMail nearly perfectly. Messages would come in instantly, and whether I read new ones on the phone or in GMail, it would get marked as read on the other side in under five minutes. Moving messages in and out of my inbox also reflected perfectly on the phone in no time. Why can't the Blackberry, a far more advanced phone, do the same?

And the GMail mobile app is not working the way Google claims. They say that if it's in the foreground it'll check messages every five minutes, every 20 minutes in the background. Well, I've had it in the background all morning and it still doesn't know about the new email I can see sitting in my GMail inbox. Ideally I would just use the mobile GMail app. I'd much rather have the conversation view than a mess of emails in my inbox.

Sorry to sound so annoyed, but my whole life is in Google. I run my business through GMail. If I can't get it to work, I'm going to have to return this wonderful new phone.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[tadrscin]

Unfortunately I don't think you can get what you want. I'm not sure who is the cause of the problem, RIM or Google, but either way it just doesn't work the way it should. The best I've been able to do is to use Imap and have it sync from my BB to Gmail. Any e-mails read on my computer will have to be marked as read on my BB manually. I gave up on Imap because I was getting delays of close to 15 minutes more times than I could tolerate. I use several gmail accounts on my BB so the Gmail app doesn't do me any good even if it worked right. I posted a message on Google about it that you responded as well. So far I haven't heard of anything changing. I've read that Imap is working with Yahoo mail, but I tried my yahoo account and it works the same way as Gmail when using Imap. Same thing for my e-mail though the domain that I have. Makes me think that this is a RIM issue. I won't give up my BB for it, but it is highly annoying.

[bmcclure937]

Just use POP, that is the only way to get reliable Google EMail in a timely manner.

You will have to deal with the unread messages in your inbox, but it is better than never getting a time sensitive email!

Also, you could always tell GMail to archive messages accessed through POP. That would partially solve the issue depending on your situation

[Dignan17]

Thanks for the reply. At the moment, I'm considering giving up the push email in favor of my sanity It seems strange to own a blackberry and not use the BIS that ATT offers, but if it's between extremely annoying syncing issues and a slight delay in email, I'll take the latter.

I only one GMail account, but I have at least 10 addresses feeding into it. I think the GMail mobile app will suffice.

[bmcclure937]

Welcome to CrackBerry!! Sorry you could not find an end solution, but we tried...

I am sure a better solution will be available eventually...

[mrlee2k8]

I also use gmail...glad you shed some light on this.

[yankees9920]

Just use POP, that is the only way to get reliable Google EMail in a timely manner.

You will have to deal with the unread messages in your inbox, but it is better than never getting a time sensitive email!

Also, you could always tell GMail to archive messages accessed through POP. That would partially solve the issue depending on your situation

With POP it syncs deleted messages between blackberry and gmail? and you are able to archive?

[bmcclure937]

With POP it syncs deleted messages between blackberry and gmail? and you are able to archive?

That is not what I said... at all

You will have to deal with the unread messages in your inbox, but it is better than never getting a time sensitive email!

[yankees9920]

That is not what I said... at all

Your right lol, but you are able to archive?

[Dignan17]

With POP it syncs deleted messages between blackberry and gmail? and you are able to archive?

Yeah, that's not what he was saying. He was saying that POP, the way it's set up by default, is the only way to be certain that you'll get instantaneous notification of new mail, as soon as it hits GMail's servers and is available to your GMail inbox. He was having issues with delays on IMAP. I'm not seeing those delays, but I'm not getting the advantages of IMAP either, which defeats the purpose of using it entirely.

To answer your question directly: no, you can't do any of that. You especially can't archive from the BB using either method.

To summarize:
The only way to get push email: POP (though I didn't have trouble with IMAP)
The only way to get everything else: GMail mobile app

The only other thing you don't get with the GMail app is an icon in the usual notification area. Instead it changes the program icon. I can live with that too, and you can still use all the other notification methods (tone, vibrate, LED).

I've now removed my GMail account from my BIS. Hopefully one day they'll iron out the kinks. ...or I'll trade in for an Android phone