A few years ago, when I tired of maintaining a Postfix mail server, I moved Fusionary’s mail to Google Apps and life became much easier. No complaints, and we’ve been there ever since. Most Gmail users I know are happy with the web app and consider it an improvement all around. Not me, I’m a desktop app guy and I prefer Apple’s Mail.app (“Mail” from now on.)

Using Mail with Gmail while keeping things synced between multiple Macs is possible, thanks to IMAP, so that’s what I’ve always done. Or at least that’s what I did until recently. Gmail’s IMAP implementation is a bit non-standard and can be flakey, and getting Mail to act right always seemed to take a bit too much tweaking.

Gmail’s insistence on tags vs folders requires clients to jump through hoops so that tags act like folders. I like tags and folders, which is why I love MailTags so much. The problem is that MailTags can’t sync tags when using Gmail’s version IMAP.

My solution is to copy all of my mail from Gmail to MobileMe.

Two weeks ago I configured Gmail to forward all of my mail to a MobileMe account and I set up Mail to use MobileMe’s IMAP instead. I can think of a few benefits right off.

1. I now have all my mail being stored in two separate locations. This means that if I ever end up being one of those unfortunate Gmail users who wakes up one day with all of my email missing, I’ll have some redundancy.
2. Mail works flawlessly with MobileMe. No more pseudo folders or “[All Mail]” nonsense.
3. MailTags tags and other settings sync nicely between all of my Macs, yay!

There doesn’t seem to be a downside to this. MobileMe offers something like 20GB of storage, and I don’t use it for photos or anything so that should be plenty. I hold out hope that Apple will some day turn MobileMe into something great, and when that happens, I’ll be ready.

I still use Gmail as my email search engine, because it’s much better at search than either Mail or MobileMe.

After two weeks I can say that this experiment has been a success. Besides, there’s almost no friction in changing my mind later. I just simply re-activate my Gmail account in Mail and stop forwarding everything. Don’t see that happening though.

[UPDATE Monday Mar 3 2011 at 5:28 PM] Macworld posted an article on how to make Gmail and Mail work better together, in case you don’t like the idea I presented above.