I was an avid Sparrow user for many months. I still love the interface of Sparrow, but prefer native apps, made by Apple. The main reason for this is the future. Made by Apple means a future proof app, which will likely support new OSX native features (iCloud anyone?). So when OSX Lion launched last week, one of the first things I did was setup the new Apple Mail client.
Labels in Mail
Like all Apple Mail clients, there was one annoying thing which wasn’t working properly: labels. It works like a charm on Sparrow, even with colors! Apple Mail does display the labels and working with them is easy by dragging the labels onto your favorites bar (see screenshot below). This will allow you to drag email messages onto the label in your favorites bar and this will move the message to that label. The only thing missing is colors, but we’ll have to just live without them.
Gmail’s archiving does work in Mail
Gmail’s archiving feature does work, but there’s a catch. You need to manually archive your mail.
Gmail and archiving
You first have to understand Gmail’s archiving feature: all your mail in Gmail is located in a label called ‘All mail’. When you receive a new email, this email will have two labels: ‘All mail’ and ‘Inbox’. When you archive an email in Gmail, the label ‘Inbox’ will be removed.
The problem
OSX Lion’s Mail works differently: it doesn’t remove the ‘Inbox’ label when archiving, but instead it adds another label: ‘Archive’.
The fix
So we’re screwed, right? Not really! There’s an easy fix, which takes about 5 seconds every time you wish to synchronize your archive with Gmail. Being a devoted lifehacker, manual archiving is something I’d like to avoid, but this is just how it is currently.
So without further ado, this is how it works.
- First we open the [Gmail] folder by clicking on the arrow in front of the label [Gmail] in the left sidebar of Mail.
- Open the ‘Archive’ folder
- Now select all your archived messages by hitting ‘cmd + a’.
- Drag your selection onto the ‘All mail’ folder inside the [Gmail] folder (see screenshot)
- That’s it, you’re all done! Easy peasy!
(Source: gpsietzema.com)
