[afarerkind]

I have just had a major victory, and I couldn't find any useful guidance on the Internets while I was working on it, so I feel compelled to share.

I have been fighting with my 8900 since I got it a couple months ago. On my old Curve 8310, I had struck a perfect balance of using the Gmail app to search my archives when I needed to (disable the LED and tone notifications to it didn't bug me about new messages) and using my level 1 inbox for incoming e-mails and SMS/MMS all in one place.

I wanted to do the exact same thing on my new blackberry, but I couldn't get the e-mail set-up dialogue to let me enter my own settings. Previously, I didn't enter a password and it told me it couldn't complete the set up and let me finish it myself. On the new phone, it just demanded that I enter a password, just like a required field in a form. And I couldn't find any other way to make it let me enter my own mail server (imap.gmail.com instead of pop.gmail.com).

It turns out all you have to do is enter a nonsense e-mail address AND a password so that the device can't do its magic but will let you proceed. That let me enter my own settings, and, voila, I am back to the gmail/blackberry/imap trifecta.

Let me back up and say that I've read several complaints about the functionality of pop gmail on blackberry, usually having to do with reconciling read messages. My biggest complaint is not that (that doesn't happen to me, actually), but that my gmail filters don't seem to apply to my blackberry inbox when I'm using pop/push. Specifically, I have an elaborate series of filters to keep fliers out of my inbox. Stuff like Banana Republic sales that I do want, but not in my face all the time. I get a ton of that stuff, so without them being filtered out of my blackberry, I've been getting sale fliers about every 15 minutes for the last two months. And now that Christmas shopping season is upon us, it's been obscene. I had like 20 such messages the mornings of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The beautiful thing about imap gmail is when you enable imap in gmail, you can also enable a lab that lets you select which labels show in imap. I unselect my fliers label, and I never see any of those in my level 1 inbox.