If you are syncing data between your CHCS Google account and an iPhone, let us know. We need to change a setting to ensure it will work.

Managing email, social networks, and other electroniic communications is a must for me, and for most of the folks I talk to. Macworld has an excellent series on how to manage email. (Their techniques work on other computers, too.)

If you missed my earlier post on this subject, here's the link. How do you manage electronic communications?

At CHCS, we have moved our email accounts, and those of our clients, to Google Apps. It's pretty reliable, although (like anything else) there are occasional outages.

If you are having problems with your email, try these steps.

• Check to make sure your internet connection is working.
  • Using a web browser, go to a web page you haven't been to recently.
  • Check to see if you can access your mail on someone else's computer.
• Try logging into your mail account through the web. Using a web browser, go to http://mail.your_domain_name.com (replace with your actual domain name; substitute .org or .net, as appropriate)
• If the above web address doesn't work, try one of these:
  • http://mail.google.com/a/your_domain_name.com
  • https://mail.google.com/a/your_domain_name.com
  • http://start.your_domain_name.com
  • https://start.your_domain_name.com
• If you are using the Firefox web browser, try installing the Gmail Manager add-on and logging in that way. (This is a great add-on in any case. Highly recommended!)
• If you are using an email client program like Outlook, Thunderbird, or Apple Mail, try restarting it.
• Try restarting your computer.

Go to the following locations to check the status of Google Apps Mail.

• Google Apps Status Dashboard Look for Google Mail under Today's Status.
• Gmail Help Look for a box with a red border at the top right of the page.
• Google Apps Help Forum See if anyone else has posted a problem.
• CHCS System Status (also available here and by phone at 206-686-2777, option 5).

Almost all of our clients are now using email from Google Apps Gmail. It's an excellent system, particularly now that it supports IMAP. IMAP has many benefits, such as allowing you to sync between machines easily.

But Gmail doesn't set up IMAP quite like the standard. Thus, email programs like Thunderbird, Apple Mail and Outlook have needed some tweaking.

But now, Gmail has a way of controlling how IMAP works. It's experimental, so use with caution, but so far, I like what I see.

Here's how to set it up.

1. Log in to the web interface for your email account at http://mail.YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME.com/
2. Go to Settings at the top right of your screen.
3. You'll see several tabs. Look for one called Labs. If you don't see it, cut and paste the following address into your browser's address bar, and press Enter.
   
   https://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=1#settings
   
   This will enable the Labs tab.
4. Now click on the Labs tab, and look for Advanced IMAP Controls. Click Enable, scroll down and click Save Changes.
5. You will now have several new options available to you (see the link below for details). But the one that is probably most useful is "Show in IMAP." In Settings, go to the Labels tab. If you don't want to see, say, the Starred or Spam folders in your email program, uncheck the corresponding box. That's it!

More information about Advanced IMAP Controls is available from the Official Gmail Blog. As I said, this is experimental, so use with caution. But you might like the results.

Gmail uses a slightly non-standard way of dealing with folders, including trash. You can improve how your CHCS Gmail interacts with Apple Mail (Mail.app) by following the instructions in CHCS Knowledge Base Article 200. Thanks to Mac OS Hints.

If you are using Gmail from CHCS, you probably already know that you can read your mail by going to http://mail.Your_Domain_Name.com The Gmail web interface is very flexible, and there are lots of ways that people have come up with to improve it. Here's a compilation of tips. Note that it also has links to several other Gmail tip sites.