Gmail

Calendar Sync with the IPhone for Google Apps for Domains

February 22, 2009 by Tom 1 Comment

Google just released a new feature – iPhone sync for Google Calendar! That was the first thing I tried to do when I got my iPhone. I ended up using a workaround through NeuvaSync.com. It worked perfectly and thus I was a little hesitant to try the official version out. The little banner at the top of my Google Calendar homepage, finally got to me though:

I had to try it out.

I went through all of the steps, but it the instructions didn’t work! It appeared that it worked perfectly for regular google calendar owners, but when you used Google Apps for Domains it didn’t work.

It took several hours of searching to finally figure out what was going on. The Mobile Sync wasn’t enabled in my Google Apps account. But also, I didn’t even have the ability to enable it! Here are the steps that I had to take to get Calendar Sync working for my Google Apps for Domains account:

1. Go to Domain Settings at the top:

2. All the way at the bottom, make sure that your control panel has Next Generation selected.

3. Now, go over to Service Settings on the top right. You’ll now have a “Mobile” option. This wasn’t there for me until I selected “Next Generation” in the control panel section.

4. Enable the Sync and you’re off. The original instructions link should now work perfectly!
http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html

Gmail Signature Float Update

June 20, 2008 by Tom 1 Comment

One of the annoying things about using Gmail (or Google for Hosted Domains) for business email is the way it handles your signatures.

Gmail has always taken and put your signature at very bottom of the email below the conversation, assuming that is where you’ll be writing your reply. I tend to like to reply at the top of the email, so I end up copy/pasting my signature each time. Quite a pain.

Then came Firefox and a Greasemonkey script that does the copy/paste for you. This worked great and all was well…

Then GMail came out with a newer version of their interface and this broke the Greasemonkey script. Back to square one.

It’s been about almost a year now and the script hasn’t been updated.

But – at last! GMail came out with a feature that does it for you! It’s in GMail Labs, and it does exactly what this Greasemonkey script did, but now it’s part of GMail itself – so it works in any browser.

Yay! The little things that make my day 🙂

Copying my Gmail account to a new “Gmail for your Domain” account

May 29, 2006 by Tom 3 Comments

I recently got accepted for the beta of “Gmail for your Domain” – a service that allows you to have professional email addresses like [email protected] instead of coolbob123@ gmail.com.

Then came the problem of over 6000 emails that I had in my current Gmail account that I now wanted in my new Gmail account. How to migrate the emails? I was surprised that I got so many good answers when I searched “migrating gmail account”. I ended up trying variations of all the solutions given in the top 3-4 results, but they all ended up being too complicated, not working, etc.

Because it was such a pain, I thought I’d share my solution. I finally ended up using Mark Lyon’s GMail Loader (GML), which is by far the best utility out there for it.

I had to do the following:

Download my mail from my old Gmail account into clean account in OutlookExpress
Find out where OutlookExpress was storing my mail (Tools -> Options -> Maintenance -> Store Folder)
Go to that location and copy the .dbx file (and place it somewhere I could locate it easily) I wanted to upload to my new Gmail (inbox.dbx) in my case
Download a utility called DBXConv and run it on my newly acquired dbx file. It’s a command line utility so I simply had to run “dbxconv inbox.dbx” and it converted it to the much more agreable mbx format.
Run the Gmail Loader
It didn’t work right away for me. The default SMTP server gsmtp57.google.com doesn’t work. I then made the mistake of assuming that Google had disabled all their SMTP servers that would work with a program like this. I then tried my ISP’s SMTP, my web host’s SMTP, and several other SMTP’s. They all didn’t work (I think because they all didn’t allow open relays or something.). If I had read the instructions all the way, however :), I would have done what he suggested and it would have worked without all the extra flailing. I did what he said and I used mob.net’s mx tool to find a working Google SMTP server, entered that in and it worked!!
Now all that was left was to upload the 6,000+ emails, which ended up taking about 10 hours. Good thing it was a three day weekend!