Here's one best-of-both worlds approach: download with Mail.app, and have Gmail automatically archive your downloads.

Here's a screencapture of that choice in the settings (choice #2):

That way, you can use Mail.app as you have become accustomed, and yet you 1) have a backup of your business mail in Gmail, and 2) can reaccess your business mail from anywhere. Plus, if you reply to email in Gmail, your sent mail is downloaded with your other email, so you can file it with Sent Mail in Mail.app, just as you could (in a way) with an IMAP account. So everything's together, and not scattered between two places.

For good measure, since I know what a crankifying experience setting up a new email account can be (or, it has been for me), here's my screenshots of exactly the Mail.app settings that work for Gmail:

Yoicks! That _does_ seem like a best-of-both-worlds approach.

Thanks

You are so welcome! I'm so glad I could help. Let me (us) know if you have any more questions about setting up, managing, etc. :cool:

Ooh--don't forget you can download a .pdf of this thread (or any) for future reference (http://board.43folders.com/sendmessage.php?do=sendtofriend&t=1023">http://board.43folders.com/pdfthread.php?t=1023[/url]) or email it to your business gmail account ([url]http://board.43folders.com/sendmessage.php?do=sendtofriend&t=1023) for archivement (yes, I just made up that word). :D

I'm so tantalizingly close I can taste it, but no cigar yet. I've followed your prompts meticulously, double checking all the way, and yet I've failed to get Mail 1.3.11 to harmonize with Gmail. GoDaddy forwards my domain name messages to my ISP's email. I have my ISP set up to forward all my email to my Gmail account. I was advised to do it this rather than to forward direct to Gmail.

Well, it works fine, everything gets to my Gmail inbox with no sweat. The problem is my Mail.app will not cooperate with Gmail or the other way around. I can send from Mail.app, but not receive. While I'm not losing any mail (at least, I don't think so), I'm failing in desire to handle all my email from Mail.app. It's a pain to be obliged to read my mail at the Gmail web site.

I would be ever so grateful if you could put your finger on what I'm missing. I wish to reiterate, I'm certain I've followed all the steps in creating my Gmail account to a T.

Carla, thanks, this is perfect. I have switched from FF back to Safari, and doing so, dropped GTDGmail, and wanted a way to better work with QS and Actiontastic. These settings were exactly what I was looking for. Now I can look at some of the mail tagging apps, etc.

Funny how I'm migrating back to the provided apps like Safari and Mail after years of using other options.

I've followed Carla's instructions about how to use Gmail's POP access, etc. and it's working great -- with one little snag.

Is there any way to avoid downloading all of the new messages from my Gmail account? I'm subscribed to a mailing list with pretty heavy traffic, and I'd just as soon leave those archived at Gmail and never have them downloaded to Mail.app. I've set up a filter in Gmail that tells it to "Skip Inbox" and "Archive" messages from that mailing list, but it seems that they still get downloaded to Mail.app when I POP in.

The closest workaround I've come up with so far is to add a rule in Mail.app that says to immediately trash those mail messages when it downloads them -- but it will still of course download them first, which is a drag.

Any ideas on how to work around this?

Google is generous with it's accts. Don't over do it though.

One solution I came up with a month or so ago has worked well for me thus far.
Since GMail does not support IMAP, I elected to do the following:
1. I signed up for a free email provider that supports IMAP. I found that AOL has 2 GB of storage and supports IMAP, so I signed up with them.
2. I forwarded all email from GMail to my new AOL address.
3. I configured Mail.app to connect to the AOL address for IMAP, but SMTP uses GMail.

It's mite bit convoluted, but it allows me to still use my GMail address - nobody needs to know the AOL address. If I don't have my MBP with me, I can still read and send message on the web.

Of course, I'm at my work PC, so I can't look at the technical configurations (ports, server addresses, etc.) right now. But if it's required, I can post them later.