Synchronising e-mail between my PC and NEXUS 7

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

This is not strictly relating to a mobile telephone issue but the solution you may have adopted will help me I think.

I have bought a NEXUS 7. My aim is to synchronise e-mail between it and my PC so my wife is no longer left on her own in the living room watching TV while I 'play' on the PC.
This ability is taken for granted by my bosses with their work e-mail.

I use Outlook on my PC and thought it would be simple to set up. (I read e-mail on my PC, not via webmail).
I now find O2 uses POP3 which means once an e-mail is downloaded it is deleted from the O2 sever and therefore no longer available for synchronisation across devices.

How do people get round this? Do you use webmail? (Not my preferred option)

Or, do you use Google mail or some other solution? If so please can you teach me?

I have an O2 and a Hotmail e-mail address. Ideally I'd like to keep these and be able to have them and my e-mail contacts (stored in Outlook on my PC) 100% synchronised between the PC and the NEXUS.

Thank you,
rabbituk

[Anonymous]

Hello MI5,

Thank you again.
So now I have set up gmail in Outlook.

I have sent a message from Outlook using O2, and received it back into Outlook.
But the Oulook account for gmail defaults to a POP3 account so I can't set up IMAP (the box to select it is 'greyed out' after gmail auto set up, unless you know better).
I think this means the account is not synchronised - and after a test this appears to be so. Grrr!

So do I have to abandon Outlook as an email tool? Or leave O2 which is what I am tempted to do if I can't get this to work.

Keeping it was my preference because it's what I'm used to and what I use at work. (I have never used webmail)

For example I can't see how to download e-mails / attachment to my PC to keep on my drive as my copy outside gmail, although I'm sure it's there somewhere.... And I don't like the adverts!

Perksie, I'm not sure what you mean.

I get too many e-mails to be reading / deleting them 2 or 3 times (once on the PC, and then again on your NEXUS 4). Is this what you mean you have to do?

Thanks again,

[MI5]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

But the Oulook account for gmail defaults to a POP3 account so I can't set up IMAP (the box to select it is 'greyed out' after gmail auto set up, unless you know better).

---

Log into your GMail on a PC and go to settings, then the forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, check if you have IMAP enabled. Remember to go to the bottom of the page to save any changes you make.

[perksie]

---

@Anonymous wrote:
Perksie, I'm not sure what you mean.

I get too many e-mails to be reading / deleting them 2 or 3 times (once on the PC, and then again on your NEXUS 4). Is this what you mean you have to do?

---

I use my phone when away from home and the pc at home, I thought that's what you were after, if I set each device to get the email it will appear on both.

[Anonymous]

Hello MI5 and Perksie,
I hope you are not finding this journey too tedious.............

I disabled gmail POP3 and set as IMAP.
I then deleted the gmail account I had set up in Outlook and remade it as IMAP

Curiously it has made a new folder for g-mail so I will have to change this to be my normal inbox etc (I don't want 2)

But regarding the synchronisation...............
I sent an e-mail from my o2 e-mail address to itself.

It arrived back in Outlook but does not appear in gmail on the web. So it won't be there on the NEXUS. Looks like we've gone complete circle

Any more ideas?

Perksie,
I want what you have suggested but I want more.
I want all my e-mails to go to the PC (and be read in Outlook).
I also want the to appear on the NEXUS 7 in parallel

Then if I delete an e-mail from the NEXUS 7 (say) I want it also to delete from Outlook on the PC.
To be honest I thought this would be very basic stuff because many people have PCs and Android devices. I believe it is also normal in a business environment to prevent duplication of work etc......

[MI5]

You won't be able to delete off the Nexus and have it delete an email already polled to Outlook, that's just not possible. Outlook stores any polled mail locally and does not replicate against a server. You would need to use Lotus Notes to be able to complete this request. Regarding your email appearing in Outlook but not GMail is again impossible. For Outlook to have received it it has to have gone through your GMail account. It is most likely in either your Priority Inbox (not regular Inbox) or in the spam folder.

[Anonymous]

Hello MI5,
Please forgive my misunderstanding from last night - it was getting passed my bedtime.....

I have repeated the test - sending from my o2 e-mail to itself and I can see the e-mail on the web, on the NEXUS and on the PC (in a gmail folder).

I had thought it possible to have true e-mail synchronisation using Outlook.

Please be patient with me.

I also think my confusion has come from a misunderstanding of e-mail addresses and e-mail clients e.g. Outlook. Unfortunately I remain confused so please forgive me if what I write is stupid now.

Before we started, my Outlook was set so that messages remain on the server, despite being POP3.
Sending them to G-mail seems to delete them from the server so I am now receiving them back in Outlook using IMAP

This seems very complicated.

So can we simplify?

I can set Outlook so that email is not deleted from the server.

Can I set up an "Android" email client in the same way and will it receive the O2 e-mails as well?

What then deletes the e-mail from the server? Is it deleting from either Outlook or the Android email client?
If so this means I will only get duplicates when downloaded and not deleted before the other device is used.

Alternatively should I change my O2 address to another and use IMAP in a similar way to the above?

Or can you suggest what is "normal" for e-mail management before I complicated things?

[MI5]

Hopefully I am understanding the question correctly....? IMAP replicates the server. Consider your webmail client as "The Server". When you delete from either outlook or android the mail will be deleted off the server (unless you choose to leave on the server). If you download to android and delete mails they will not appear on outlook afterwards and vice versa, however, if you download to Outlook and then after download to android and subsequently delete emails from android they will still remain in Outlook as it's a one way replication only. You will get the same actions using Outlook no matter what email provider you use, however, it may be beneficial to you to switch your email over to GMail, esp as O2 mail may have a limited life span with the Sky takeover.... GMail also will give you more space and greater flexibility over different devices.


"Normal" is different things for different people. I Use Lotus Notes on my PC and Lotus Notes Traveler on my phone for my business email and GMail (webmail on PC), app on my phone for personal mail.....

[Anonymous]

Thanks again for your patience MI5.

It looks like I'm getting to a better but still slow understanding....

I am going to migrate all my O2 traffic to gmail by asking everyone to use my gmail address(instinctively I'd like to not use Google or MS but I'd like a simple life too).

Outlook on my PC is now already set to receive gmail using IMAP so this part is done.

I then need to do something with my other e-mail address, currently hotmail. (I'd like to keep 2 addresses - one is for sign up with less personal stuff that is not so essential in case of SPAM etc (luckily I get almost none)).
Unfortunately I read hotmail does not use IMAP so I can't set it up like the gmail.
- I think 1 way is to link my gmail account with the Hotmail account using POP3.

- I think another is to use 'Exchange Active Sync'

Do you think 1 method is better than the other?

(I am thinking  I'd like to read all my e-mails in 1 application only on the NEXUS and in Outlook on the PC. Although I am not sure the 'EAS' route suggests to me that I would need 2 applications on the NEXUS).

And when I have done this I need to manage my contacts between the NEXUS and the PC so they are also aligned.

All my contacts exist in Outlook on my PC now. I have never added them to webmail so I don't know if they are stored there in some way by default.

I guess they now need to be on the web so they can be available on the NEXUS and in the PC. Please can you advise the best way of managing this?

(I thought I had already tried this in gmail but cannot see a list of contacts when trying to compose a mail)

Thank you again, and sorry if this is painful for you.....

[MI5 · Accepted solution]

Not at all painful

You can import your hotmail through GMail in the same way as your O2 mail. This way they will all come into Outlook or on your Nexus through the same app. Outlook can also be configured to poll your hotmail separately (It will poll multiple email addresses through the one programme, just add your hotmail as a POP account, however, I'm sure you can IMAP hotmail also).

To get your contacts into GMail go into your contacts in Outlook and from the menu export your contact file as a .csv. Then open contacts in the GMail web interface and choose the option to import that .csv file you just created. This contact file will sync with your GMail and also your phone. The other option for syncing phone to Outlook is to use this app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fjsoft.myphoneexplorer.client&feature=nav_result#?... it's 2 parts, one for phone and one for PC, but don't accept the additional software that comes as a suggestion with the PC client.

Did we get all the Q's...? If not, just ask again

[Toby]

Very good advice here MI5, well done.