The Cloud hits the Ground

When email storage space was limited users had to keep their inbox small, messages organized to folders and delete every message that wasn't absolutely important. Now you can use services like GMail that have (practically) unlimited storage space in "the Cloud" and let you search your messages so quickly it makes organizing just a waste of time. When using GMail I just don't organize nor archive messages - search is enough.

Nokia's S60 phones have an email client that can regularly login to your IMAP mail account and load new messages. When you enable that feature, it will disable the setting that limits the number of messages in your phone's email account (why is it like that?). Tried this automatic refreshing feature with GMail, decided to disable it and left other settings untouched.

Later I began to wonder why the email access has become very slow in my phone and why some applications either crashed or displayed clearly wrong information about my mailbox status. Then I checked the message count from my terminal's email application and there were 3900 email messages listed! Having all messages in your inbox is not a problem when processing happens in the Cloud, but then (fattish) clients like S60 email application will hit the Ground.

I know there is a GMail application available for my phone, but I rather use the native messaging application because that way I can have all my SMS/MMS/Email messages stored in the same place and I can access those without switching the applications.

Having all messages in the same place, hmmm....

Why my SMS/MMS messages are only in the phone? I'd like to have those archived in the Cloud, too. When I work with the messages, I'd like the changes to be replicated to my GMail account - that way I could also use GMail application to access my messages from the Cloud and messages would also be stored in a safe place. If all my messages were replicated like that, there could be just a new folder available in the GMail mobile application to access my SMS messages. That would also allow me to do search from all of my messages, no matter what media was used to deliver it. As far as I understand, it is no rocket science to create a solution like this to upload messages automatically to the Cloud. Anyone interested to try?

//Harri