Blackberry + Gmail: My Perfect Setup

The problem for me with setting up GMail via Blackberry Internet Services the straight forward way was that my blackberry was getting everything my GMail account was getting, not just the stuff that shows in the inbox. That meant that all the mailing lists and other crap I’d rather not be annoyed with, which I’ve effectively removed from bothering me constantly by creating auto-archive filters + labels, was annoying me more than ever. Sure, BIS had filtering options, but rather than keep my filters in two places, I figured out a way to have the best of both worlds.

My requirements:

• Only emails that I deem worthy to arrive in my inbox buzz my blackberry.
• I have access to the other emails, if need-be.
• When I send or reply to a message, it shows in GMail, keeping conversations intact, and providing an archive for all sent mail.

Achieving #2 is easy — you get the GMail application. While I’d prefer not to use it alone, it serves this purpose quite well. I can search all of my messages, and dig around my auto-filtered mail, if I should choose.

#1 and #3 seem straight forward, but require a few key tricks.

First, set up a blackberry email address. You know, something like yourname@mycingular.blackberry.net. In it, put your reply-to address as something you’d like to actually be contacted at. Either your plain ol’ gmail account, or an alias that forwards to it. For me, I chose the latter. Now set Auto BCC to your gmail account. This is key for keeping your conversations in tact. So it should look like:

Email Account: Blackberry
Your Name: Joe Mama
Email: joemama@mycingular.blackberry.net
Reply To: joe@joemama.com
AutoBC.C: joemama@gmail.com

Now we need GMail to forward you all mail that gets to your inbox, unless it’s from you. You can do this by creating a filter, like so:

“Matches: in:inbox -{from:joe@joemama.com}”
Do this: Forward to joemama@mycingular.blackberry.net

Now we need to make sure any email that is from you gets archived and doesn’t arrive in your inbox. We can make this happen by creating one more filter, like so:

Matches: from:(joe@joemama.com) in:inbox
Do this: Skip Inbox

And that’s it! This setup works perfectly for me. It took lots of experimenting to finally figure out a really good solution, but this seems to be it. I hope the next version of BIS allows you to choose one email account to send all email through, which would eliminate the need for the AutoBCC trick.