Not every relationship is all rosy…
(man, I never thought I’d say this, but the on-screen keyboard is actually faster and easier to use than the hardware keyboard!!!)
Anyhow… when I switched to Android I switched my email notifications from SMS to Gmail. A little background:
I run my own personal email server, and while it supports IMAP Push, I’ve never found a client implementation of that protocol that had acceptable battery usage. Regardless, while it’s nice to get your emails immediately and be able to perform some action on them immediately, I’ve always wanted to maintain strict control over which emails generate a “new mail” alert.
There are a number of ways around that triage problem. But then you get into complexities over how you want your mail organized vs. what you want to be notified about… Long story short, I opted to create an out-of-band notification system specifically for the emails I was interested in. This has the added bonus of being extensible, so that I can define times of day that notifications are active, complex state tables that affect notification eligibility, and things like remote awareness.
Anyhow, these out-of-band notifications were traditionally delivered via SMS, and in the WinMo world I had coded a solution whereby a second, specially-formatted SMS would tell Pocket Outlook to sync email. The result was a poor-man’s push solution – perfectly functional, if not the most efficient.
So that’s the background. Since I place great value on the flexibility of this notification system, it was paramount that I could carry over its core intent to my Android smartphone. And I opted to ditch SMS and go with Gmail as the delivery mechanism.
So that’s the background then.
What I’ve been finding, much to my dismay, is that I’ve been missing notifications. In the SMS world it was possible that a notification would get delayed, or lost altogether – but I didn’t expect that from Gmail’s push notification system running on Android 2.2.
After some digging I came to realize that quite a few of these missed notifications were indeed making it to my phone, but they were ending up in the trash and hence no alert was being generated by the Gmail app.
Gosh darnit! Chock it up to Gmail’s “conversatons”, where your emails are grouped (ie., “threaded”) by subject. So if you decide to delete a single message in a conversation (which is something you can’t do in the mobile app – more on that in a minute) then the whole conversation would have a “trash” label applied to it.
And it seems that when a conversation has the trash label applied, the mobile Gmail app removes it from the inbox view. Critically, it won’t alert because the new message is part of a “deleted” conversation.
Now, I haven’t tested this, but it’s possible that things would work differently if you delete a single message in the Gmail web app. But on the Android app no such option exists – it’s the conversation or nothing at all.
Now I have to imagine that this is of the utmost frustration to people who use Gmail (and the Gmail mobile app) as their primary mail client. Fortunately I’m not one of those people, so I’m testing a solution (and it may be that this can apply to the aforementioned group of people too – unless they’ve figured it out already).
Basically, you don’t delete anything.
This is something that Gmail originally trumpeted – that you now had so much space that you’d never to delete an email again. And because you need some way to manage a huge inbox with email that’s never deleted, and people generally pout if they can’t permanentky delete their own email, Google acquiesced and added some trash “label” and other what-not to appease the masses.
But in my case those solutions don’t work. I can get by without deleting because I only care about new emails – or more accurately, new notifications of new emails.
So my solution is not to delete, but also, to only sync 1 day worth of email out of my inbox. That way, the old undeleted stuff will fall out of view in the mobile Gmail app. I’m also syncing “all” starred items, so if something is of interest and I need it to stick around for a few days – like a URL that I’ve emailed myself – then I can star it and it will remain in view.
That’s the theory. I’ve only just now made all the changes, so you’ll need to follow tradition and give me a few days to deal with the (inevitable?) fallout.