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I know what you mean, Jon. As an academic too, I look at my communication needs differently than either a typical personal or corporate user. I've gone through all sorts of contortions to get a good solution to keeping my mail, contacts, tasks and appointments synchronized between two (now three) computers and my WM phone.
IMAP is clunky and I really don't like it, but I still use it for my work mail because our IT folks set us up a mail system that would have been impressive in 1992, but just looks sad in 2009. I have Gmail pick up my work mail via POP3 and then use my college return address on outgoing mail. It works, but the IMAP connections are slow and unreliable so it's frequently a bit irritating.
I lived with it, though, when I was on XP and I physically carried my WM phone back and forth and used Activesync to sync all the rest. But when I got Vista at home, that was the end of that. The mobile device center is so unuseable that it actually makes Activesync look sleek and reliable and I finally gave up on it completely.
That put me in a jam for syncing all my non-mail stuff and so I invested in an Exchange 2007 account. Wow, I should have done that long ago. It is fast, secure, automatic and reliable. Now it doesn't matter which device I use, everything is always there and up-to-date. And if all else fails, I can just pop on with Outlook Web Access. I wish my college would get it, but that's not going to happen.
My only remaining problem is that Outlook isn't a great Gmail interface so I always have to be concious of the Gmail implications of the button(s) I press in Outlook. I hope MS tweaks it a bit to be more Gmail friendly, but that would seem somewhat uncharacteristic for them. darren-lin said something about a conversation view in the next version. There's a conversation view in the current version, but it's just not as elegant as Gmail's.
What I would really like would be for Outlook to have Gmail as an option when you set up an account so that Outlook can have delete and archive buttons and so you don't have all the extra Outlook folders on top of all the Gmail folders and such. Given how many people use Outlook and use Gmail, I'm surprised that some enterprising programmer hasn't put together a Gmail add-in for Outlook that bring full functionality to it. I would totally buy something like that.
Anyway, thanks for the article. It's something a lot of us think about from time to time and it's useful to hear what happened when someone else tried it.
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