Google Hacks, 2nd Edition

Gmail on the Go

You can take it with you ... Gmail on your mobile phone, that is.

Web mail means never having to say you’re sorry that you left your laptop at home. While I can’t quite fathom it myself—I keep a lot I need beyond basic email on my laptop—there are those that wander the world sans the very core of the mobile office. They’re happy to use OP’s (other people’s). “Where there’s a web browser, there’s a way” is their credo, and for those who can swing it, more power to them.

Where this falls down for me are the between times: dashing to a meeting without the latest agenda in hand (it’s in my email inbox, but my laptop’s in my bag and there’s no wireless network in sight), meandering a foreign city and wanting to keep in touch with the folks back home but without having to lug around a laptop, and other moments such as these.

The browser experience on even the smartest of smartphones has a way to go. And most folks don’t have any more of the Internet on their phones than a basic text-only WAP view of the world Hack #67 . While WAP works to some degree, web mail services don’t tend to spend much time, if any at all, on providing a WAP interface to your email.

But there’s always a workaround ...

Gmail-mobile (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gmail-mobile; GNU Public License) is a PHP (http://www.php.net) application that sits on your web site, between your mobile phone’s WAP browser and Gmail, brokering requests on your behalf and returning a mobile-appropriate view of your ...