Google adds support for push Gmail via Exchange ActiveSync
Google Sync's pretty awesome as it is, but it's had one glaring flaw in its implementation: no support for Gmail, just Calendar and Contacts, which means you aren't able to get true push email delivered. Well, they've gone ahead and completed the holy Google trinity today with the introduction of Gmail support into the Exchange ActiveSync mix, so any phone with Exchange support should theoretically be able to get in on the action. We say "theoretically" because they're only quoting support for the iPhone and Windows Mobile at this point, but it seems like anything that can speak the EAS protocol should be able to make this happen. Let us know your trials, tribulations, and successes getting this set up in comments, won't you?






















ABOUT TIME.
AGREED.
awesome, gmail is officially the best free mail/contacts/calendar now.
microsoft, please update your web client and make hotmail equal again. we need constant competition to improve both sides!
I can't believe I used Hotmail for so long while Gmail was still around.
It's ludicrously better than Hotmail.
Perfect. Just as my mobileme subscription is about to expire. I wouldn't be surprised if google timed it for that reason.
ooooo, I might just keep my iPhone now.
+1
thank god
So its time to kiss ur battery good bye?
@vcx
No.
EAS works off signals on the carrier channel, which is always active anyway. If new mail arrives, it sends a notification to the handheld to sync which then fired up the data connection and does a sync. Otherwise it generally syncs every hour, depending on server configuration.
It DOES work with S60 exchange client, just in case if anyone was wondering. The push mail is slower than the Nokia Messaging App but it works.
Can you please explain to me what exactly this means? For example, I have the Palm Pre and it sends me a notification whenever I get an email on my Gmail account. What's the difference between this and what my Palm Pre does? Sorry if it's a stupid question :P
So I have been a frequenter of this site for several years but never bothered to register an account until just now. This is something I've waited for for a LONG time!!!! I just clicked the little check box on my samsung omnia for vzw and BAM it synced up just perfectly!!!! LOVE YOU GOOGLE!!!!!!!
Hells yeah bout time Google now is the best email out there
now i wonder will this work with the new exchange stuff on Snow Leopard?
No it won't. Snow Leopard uses the Exchange Web Services, this is based on Active Sync
The Snow Leopard apps have the dedicated ability to sync with Google Calendar and Contacts. Simply make new accounts in iCal and Address Book and you'll see the option for Google Calendar or Google Address Book account types. Enter your email and password and you're good to go. It even works for Google Apps for your Domain.
Gmail is now 100% the BEST email service out there. This is great news.
my mobileME Email much better than GMAIL...
and iT'S have shorter address..
@snoowleopard comeback when it's free like GMAIL.. (Hint: that's like saying go away and never show your face again)
what's snoow anyway?
pal :)
MobileMe's web mail absolutely sucks. Words fail to describe how much I hate it. The #1 thing that annoys me is the way that it keeps refreshing the screen (a total reload of it) periodically when I either select an email or ask it to do something like delete it, which means that I have to perform the whole action again once the screen has reloaded. That drives me nuts every single time...
I've been a .mac/MobileMe subscriber for the past 6-years but I think this will be the last time and news like this Gmail update brings me ever closer to dumping the service.
Sweet. Now I just need a mobile device with e-mail so I can use it!
FAIL
And I can safely say it works :)
Just added "Mail" to my TP2 Active Sync and it worked. I already had Calendar synced previously.
it seems your internal push notification service is still quite buggy.
email works with s60... ABOUT TIME! :)
And just as I replaced my E71.
I'm under the impression that the iPhone (others?) only supports one exchange account at a time. Is this correct?
For the iPhone, yes, that is correct. I believe the Pre and Android phones support more than one though.
::sigh:: yep, only one exchange account :(
Indeed, another feature sorely missed on the iPhone.
Not so much of a big deal for me now at the moment though as I've just found out that my college don't give me an exchange account. B******s
I got really excited, and then remembered this... sigh
Yes, for now. There's really no reason why it should be like that though - I mean, I don't think there's any technical reason why you can't sync more than one.
Winblows Mobile only supports 1 Craptivesync connection too.
Now got to decide, work or home push email.
Might stick with Work Push and Home IMAP/SMTP mail synchronisation every 15mins - seems to do the job currently.
Sure would be useful if the iPhone let you have more than one Exchange account.
FINALLY!
now if only my ActiveSync supported multiple accounts :( I'm jealous of Palm Pre users with their multiple Exchange account support!
Nice.
Ha!
I'm lazy - how do i set this up on my iPhone?
Start here: http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sync.html#p=default
I've been using Nuevasync for this for about a year now. I would hope that Google is better at syncing their mail, calendar & contacts that Nuevasync is. Not that Nuevasync is bad -- quite the opposite actually. I just think it would be funny if they did a better job syncing Gmail than Google is. I would love to stop paying that $25 a year, though...
NuevaSync is the bomb! Just like the original Contact/Calendar push, they beat Google by months to the email too.
Just activated it on my iPhone 3G and it works perfectly! No more fetching, woohoo!
@Fozzy Bear
I just nominated you Sir, for teh golden internets of the year award.
I hope you win.
Hoping that Google can fix the calendar sync, only syncs to your primary calendar :(
Google can sync multiple calendars. See this page:
http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139206
I just set it up on my iPhone and it works fine.
are you sure?
go to m.google.com/sync on your phone - you can select up to 25 calendars, other than youremailaddress@gmail.com, you'd like to sync on your phone using Google Sync.
Visit m.google.com/sync using your iPhone. You will be directed to a special page, where you will be able to choose which of your Google Calendars to sync. By default, yes, only your default calendar is selected, but you can select other calendars. Including the Google Provided birthday calendar.
However, the recent sports calendars are not supported for sync.
guess I should have said for WinMo...can anybody get multiple calendars on their winmo device?
Google Calendar sync issue:
Delete and re-add your annually recurring events and you should stop having sync errors.
Just turned on the "Mail" option on my iPhone 3GS and it works beautifully!
Mail Sync seems to be slower for me using exchange instead of Gmail Sync, can anyone confirm?
Yes, it is for me, too. Much slower. The notifications are quicker, but the emails take an eternity to load - even ones as simple as "Test!"
Same here.
Yep. At first I thought I hadn't configured it properly, but it took some 3 minutes to download mails.
Same here... I turned it off and I'll turn it back on when they get it figured out.
My god this is slow... Just turned it on in the settings on my 3GS, and deactivated the IMAP service, but this sucks hard! Have been waiting for 10 minutes now and it can't even get all the mails and sometimes the "Connection to server interupted"
Gonne turn off again till this is flawless, but really: Nice one Google - love my GMail even more now ;-)
Crap! I would try it, but I have already used the Exchange "slot" for my work's settings...
Same issue here. If I could sync secondary calendars using CalDav, I will be all set. Currently they support multiple calendars only on the Sync.
http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151674
Might have spoken too soon... just saw this article. Will try it this evening!
http://www.atnan.com/2009/6/19/configuring-multiple-caldav-google-calendars-on-iphone-os-3-0
Yes it does work! I can live with the 15 minute delays in my personal life, this is awesome!
Oh Fozzy, that my friend was about as funny a reply as I've read in weeks. Bravo!
Does anyone know if it supports HTML email on windows mobile?
Of course it does since WM email client supports HTML.
Being an Android user I've had Push Gmail for about a year now, but this is a handy way to finally have Push support on more than one Gmail account at a time.
Wait, the "Google Phone," can only have one gmail account at a time? WTF?
My WM phones could have unlimited, and even push if I had the right software.
Out of the box, my Pre can have infinite gmail, yahoo, and exchange--all instant-push.
@scrapmaker
You could always add more gmail accounts to an android phone, but only the one "linked" to the phone was push.
If only Exchange would just DIE, it's horrible and it sucks- but alas "Enterprises" are still stuck thinking the same way they did in the 90s
Kibbled_bits, so tell us all the viable "enterprise" alternative to Exchange. Aching to get the benefit of your enormous wisdom? You get bonus points for an open source one too. Bring it douche.
How about Zimbra
Of course, I'm somehow having a problem with this. I followed the instructions to the letter, but I keep getting, "cannot find server" errors or something along those lines. Anyone else have that happen?
It's not working 100% for me. Some folders won't load and sometimes I get a connection error. Probably tons of people adding it on at once...
having the same problem. cant figure it out yet.
I am having the same problem. Haven't figured out the problem.
Easy to set up...PUSH YES!!!!
"Push". I still get my e-mail faster when I double forward it (from my real account to GMail to Yahoo) just so I can get the e-mail to show up on the iPhone without too much of a wait.
GMail needs to catch up. I only use Yahoo for this reason but man it sucks.
@Bill Roehl
yep, I also the Gmail to yahoo deal for a pseudo push Gmail.
I just use the yahoo as my inbox and reply from the Gmail account
No push support for BlackBerry's yet? Or will this work on a BB also.
This works for me on an s60 n95 8gb, but i need someway of syncing tasks...
anyone got any ideas.
So far so good... the exchange set-up process is a snap. I'm only retrieving about half of my inbox so far. Double checked the mail settings to ensure that I have "no limit" selected "Mail Days to Sync" option, but can't seem to get the rest of my email. Not a big deal yet, but could be an issue.
(Angels singing) Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! (As the heavens open and the gods smile down upon the earth)
Been thinking, what the hell are they talking about in this article... It's working just fine on my phone... Then I got to the " support for the iPhone and Windows Mobile". Oh well, get yourself an Android phone and you'll be perplexed as me what's the fuss about.
slower than hell..easier to forward my gmail to my live mail account and have push that way..much much faster...so far...
me like google
Is it just me or does this seem a HELL of a lot slower than using the regular built in GMail support on the iPhone? I set it up and it took 3 minutes for it to populate my Inbox on my iPhone 3G S.
It then took almost a minute for a new email message to show up after I sent a test email from my Yahoo account. Then, when I went into the Mail.app to retrieve the message, it would only display the subject line and took forever to download the rest of the message -- in fact, it never even downloaded the rest of the message, it just said "This message has not been downloaded from the server"
Maybe Google has some issues they need to work out...
mine is incredibly slow, i think i'll leave this and my imap active for the time being, i'm sure it's just google's servers getting hammered by all the iphones that turned push on in the last few hours, they will bounce back
Agreed. I prematurely deleted my IMAP account but when it refused to download an all text message I canceled.
Is there a way to make it load 25 or 50 emails instead of just a week or month's time?
Thought I would share a warning before you try this out. I did this just 15 minutes ago and w/o warning I noticed that googe was sending out hundreds of meeting updates on my behalf for my work appointments. I had previously synced my work calendar with my phone and when it synced the calendar it proceeded to send out thousand of 'updates' for every meeting that I had previously attended. Just a tad embarrassing...
Ouch.
ooof!
Had a similar think happen when I was syncing my google calendar on my Blackberry.
would only sync in one direction so I decided to wipe the calendar and start fresh.
When I cleared the calendar, it started emailing cancellations to all the attendees on meeting that happened months ago.
Luckily I was able to yank the battery after only 5 emails fired off....
Wouldn't have been so lucky if that happened with my iphone, heheh
Now if only there was someway to completely hide the [Google Mail} folder, I've removed all the label but it still just hovers there greyed out. It really bugs me
Will it be beneficial to use this for the Pre vs what is in place right now?
I forward all my gmail to MobileMe, so I can get push service on my iPhone.
With this new service why would anyone keep MobleMe anymore?
so now, if only they could stop adding all the people I email into my contact which then gets onto my iphone, that would be awesome.
Common, give an option to control that. I don't want auto-adding into my contacts. Just let me manage it or at least not sync it.
If anyone has a solution to that, please let me know.
I forgot how I did it (or if I had to do anything special), but I have it syncing only the people in the "My Contacts" group in gmail.
yeah, you can sync only the 'my contacts' group, i forget how, but it's in the q&a on the google sync site
It's on their website. If you "keep existing contacts" when setting up the iPhone it syncs all contacts. If you chooses "delete all contacts" when setting up the iphone, it will only sync "My Contacts"
Is this new? I've been sync'ing via exchange for a couple of months now with my Nokia E71x running S60 -- both with the Nokia/AT&T provided Exchange Sync utility *and* Google's own gsync utility that could sync using the exchange protocol when I downloaded it several months ago.
Didn't like the way it sync'd calendar and contacts, so I turned off the email sync. The standalone gmail app itself is actually easier for me to use.
Its not complete until they get memos and tasks working.
I just enabled it on my iPhone 3G, and it's as easy as turning the mail slider on in my Google sync account that's already set up.
It seems really sluggish and unresponsive though, compared to the old IMAP. First, it took about 10 minutes for the phone to start syncing. That's not really a big deal, but, when I open an unread message, it seems to take 5+ minutes for it to be marked as read when observing from the Gmail web interface (refreshing the inbox to check). Same with deleting, takes a while for it to be processed.
Hopefully it's just because this thing is brand new... I guess time will tell if its performance increases for me.