The reason for all this is that I'm increasingly using multiple devices to access e-mail - my desktop computers, my laptop, and iPod Touch. The e-mail part of this was simple; I just use Gmail in IMAP mode on all the desktops and laptops, and everything pretty much just works. The iPod I sync with a combination of Gmail's exchange server connection (for my most used account, because that way I get push e-mail), and IMAP for the other accounts. Also, I no longer need to worry about archiving e-mails; everything is automatically archived to "All Mail" on Gmail. So that all worked great, and was painless to set up - just follow the Gmail instructions.
But then life got "interesting" - I also wanted to sync contacts and calendar to my Mac desktop and laptop. That got complicated and painful. Here's the story and the solution(s):
Syncing Gmail Contacts with Address Book
In theory, this is simple - all you need to do is go to Address Book - Accounts - Account Information, and enable "Synchronize with Google", provide your Gmail account information on the "Configure..." dialog, and you're done. Well, not. I soon found out that not all of my contacts were syncing. A great deal of digging around showed that I had two problems:
- Gmail can't deal with contacts that are "the same". "The same" seems to be defined by name/e-mail address/telephone number. Now that was a problem for me, as I have copies of corporate address books as Groups in Address Book, as well as some of the same contacts as personal contacts in other Groups. No problem for Address book, but a big problem for Gmail's contact list. So the duplicates needed to be purged.
- Gmail also has problems with first names/last names/company names. Historically, I'd been sloppy back when my contact list was on Outlook, and many companies were not tagged as companies, and had their company names in the "name" field of the address cards. Gmail doesn't like that either. So I needed to do a fairly major contact clean up, tagging all companies as "Company", and ensuring that the company name was in the correct field.
Syncing Gmail Calendar with iCal
Again, in theory, this is simple - all you need to do is go to iCal - Accounts and add a account and you're done. See here for detailed instructions. However, again, not so simple in practice. I soon found myself dealing with the dreaded "Calendar could not be found" error. This issue has been documented in a number of locations e.g., here and here, and a number of solutions suggested, mostly involving things that in effect reset the account by changing settings. Sadly, as has been many other people's experience, none of the suggested solutions worked for me. So, I did a bit of digging around in the details of the error messages, and some experiments with syncing first an empty calendar, then a calendar with various items in it. What I found was:
- In my case at least, the "Calendar could not be found" errors had nothing to do with account settings - I could sync empty calendars, and very simple calendars easily.
- However, once I tried to sync legacy calendar items, problems cropped up. What was happening was that the Google calendar just couldn't deal with some items, and was then returning "Calendar could not be found" errors. Not a very informative error message on Google's part.
- More digging showed that the problem calendar items were recurring appointments - Google calendar seemed to be able to deal with pretty much any single event ok (although it sometimes simplified alarms), but some recurring events just caused it to blow up.
Problem sorted, you might think. Unfortunately not - it was a day later that a show stopper turned up, in the shape of an e-mailed meeting invite. Now I run multiple e-mail accounts - two for professional purposes, one for my open source software, and a personal account. Turns out that iCal just won't allow you to place an e-mailed invite in a synced Gmail calendar. Given that I need to be able to receive invites on multiple accounts but put them into a single calendar, the iCal Google sync solution just doesn't work for me. You can work round this problem by exporting the invite to a file, then importing it into the Gmail calendar, but that's just too much work.
Alternate ways forward
Well, clearly a simple Gmail sync just wasn't going to work for me. So I started looking for alternate solutions. Here's a brief list of what I tried, and didn't work for me:
- Exchange sync to Gmail. Gmail can do a exchange type sync - that's what I use to sync to my iPod Touch. So I thought I could use that to sync to iCal. No. Turns out that a normal (free) Gmail account's Exchange sync is only to a mobile device.
- Exchange sync to Gmail enterprise. For $60/year plus the cost of a domain registration, you can get proper exchange sync. This might be a solution, but it wasn't at all clear that it would solve my multiple account issue, and it involved setting up domains, etc.
- MobileMe. Apple's sync service - tempting, but $99 per year, and means yet another account.
- Hosted Exchange servers - also a possibility, but good ones are $120/year.
- Nuevasync, which is free, and comes recommended by e.g., the folks at TechCrunch. However, it turn out that Nuevasync, like Google's Exchange sync on standard accounts, works only with mobile devices.
What I ended up with is a product called Spanning Sync. Basically, it just works. It syncs contacts and calendars, and those calendars are just regular iCal type calendars, so you can happily put invites from multiple different e-mail accounts in one calendar. Best of all, they have tech support that works - I did have one minor glitch, caused by the endless number of previous sync attempts with other solutions, but Spanning Sync's tech support responded to my query inside of 15 minutes, and their solution worked first time. Try to get that kind of service from certain other software companies I could mention.
I've now been on Spanning Sync for three weeks, and it's been flawless.
They have a trial version if you want to test the product, and the full version costs either $25 per year or $65 forever. However, if you use this discount code, you will save $5 off either:
Spanning Sync discount code: WMW883
Add a comment