Comments on: Mac Conversions – Email and Synchronization?

By: Asgeir S. Nilsen

Asgeir S. Nilsen — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 19:38:26 +0000

Becky – what do you mean the MB cannot duplex? I’ve got a 13″ MB, bought a mini-DVI to VGA adapter, and have hooked it up to both flat panel tvs, projectors and whatnot. It supports both mirroring and stretching the desktop across.

With Pages you also get speaker’s notes on the laptop panel while the projector shows the presentation.

By: Becky

Becky — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 22:53:01 +0000

For me, an important distinction between the MB and the MBP is the ability to duplex the image on an external monitor. The MacBook only allows mirroring – the Pro lets you duplex. It is the capability of duplexing that has me looking at the MacBook Pro. Oh, how I wish they had a 13″ MBP!

By: Steve Freeman

Steve Freeman — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:12:45 +0000

I use Mail.app with an IMAP service (www.luxsci.com, mention me so I get a kickback . It gives me what you need, plus webmail when I’m travelling–preserving all the folders. It doesn’t have that nice free quality that gmail has, but I use gmail for bulk items like list subscriptions, and my IMAP account for the personal stuff.

One more thing, if you have IMAP, you can drag your messages over from your POP account in Mail.app to copy them between servers.

By: Brian Marick

Brian Marick — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 14:50:20 +0000

For what it’s worth, I gave up and just do all my work on my laptop, left the iMac to gather dust and eventually be inherited by the kids.

This was 5+ years ago.

My wife does use both an iMac and laptop. She uses Synk (version 5) to synchronize the Documents directory on both. She doesn’t try to synchronize mail, browser, ~/Library, etc. Her mail is IMAP, so she doesn’t have to synchronize (but I don’t think she has any on-disk archives).

By: Dave Smith

Dave Smith — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 04:46:13 +0000

I’ll be interested to see which way you go. The final tether left to cut with my XP laptop is also email–several years worth backlog in Outlook.

By: keith ray

keith ray — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 02:47:59 +0000

The smaller black MacBook is faster than the smaller white MacBook. (No, really! It doesn’t _just_ look faster, according to the specs, last time I looked at the specs.)

The Mac Mail client is very good, with filtering and folders and other nice things, and dot-mac email even has web access (but not very easy to use) through Apple’s site. Not very good at keeping out the spam, though.

However, I’m using multiple laptops and desktops these days, and find gMail essential for accessing mail from anywhere. So I’m shifting away from my dot-mac mailing address, despite some of gMail’s flaws. Very little spam gets through in gMail.

But I don’t travel much – when I do travel, the smaller MacBook’s lighter weight makes a BIG difference.

By: David

David — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 01:21:12 +0000

I agree with Robert’s comments and would also suggest that you get a Google Apps account where you can easily create several addresses for your domain and have central administration.

I have found 2 issues with Google apps: 1. There is no way to tell it to route all mail to a POP account – if its spam filter makes a mistake, you will have to look for that mail online. 2. There is an issue with forwarding mail to certain mail servers. To go around these limitations, I have setup an account with hostgator.com which forwards all email to Google, but from which I can also forward to other accounts. For example, if you want to get all mail and filter spam on the laptop, you can forward it to a yahoo account that has Spam turned off and then use POP to move it to the laptop.

By: Eric Pugh

Eric Pugh — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:02:56 +0000

Glad to hear you are leaning towards the 13″. I’ve been going through the same dilemma, and am going to get the MB for the same reasons you mentioned!

As far as color, have you seen some of the acrylic cases that snap over them….? Actually, I think that ThoughtWorks had a MB with a red cover at CITcon.

PS, the “Test Obsessed” arm band is on my wrist right now! It’s a great prop when I do presentations on testing and agile processes.

By: adam goucher

adam goucher — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 19:46:56 +0000

While I cannot vouch for how good a solution it might be, Brian Marick mentioned EagleFilter yesterday (http://www.exampler.com/blog/2007/06/28/two-useful-mac-apps/)

-adam

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 19:12:19 +0000

You also have the option of moving to Gmail and using Google Desktop for Mac to download your messages to your local box so you can view them even when you’re offline. That way they always stay in sync.

You could also pop everything in Gmail off and leave copies on the server. Then you’d still need a local client–which brings us to your point, but since I’m a Gmail fanboy, I’ve never actually used the e-mail client on the Mac. But I’ve never had an easier time managing my e-mail than I do now–I’m faster to respond, more organized, and my Inbox is virtually clean all the time. But I digress…