How Do Gmail Accounts Show Up?

[Inundated]

One big factor in the Droid being attractive to me is the Google Experience integration. Most of my online life goes through some form of Google services, so it's great in my book.

I understand that the phone is tied to one main Google account, where you can sync to it, etc.

I have like 5 Gmail accounts, including that one I only want Gmail out of them.

How is this set up, and how does it appear?

It looks like Gmail accounts are set up separately from regular POP/IMAP. It also looks like the Gmail accounts support live "push". Right now, I have all my Gmail accounts set up with IMAP...how does this mesh with the push and how it's done on Android?

And where does the mail show up? Are all the Gmail accounts lumped in together in one inbox, or can I separate them by account?

There's not a lot of information out there about this, especially for any changes made in Android 2.0.

Thanks!

[SQFreak]

GMail accounts do not have an integrated inbox, but do all use the same application. Your notifications will tell you which account the new messages are in. Within the GMail application, you can press the Menu key, then the Accounts button to pick the account.

There is push support for multiple GMail accounts. The proper option to set to get this is to turn on Sync for mail for the accounts. (It's a little bit of a weird option - I initially thought I didn't want sync, but I did want sync for mail only.) You can synchronize contacts from as many or as few of those GMail accounts as you like.
I only have calendars on my main account, so I'm not quite sure how that works, but you can turn on and off the display of any of your calendars, including shared calendars, in the settings for calendars.

Does that answer your question? If not, let me know what you're looking for an answer to.

[Inundated]

Originally Posted by SQFreak Does that answer your question? If not, let me know what you're looking for an answer to.

Yeah, that pretty much does.

I was trying to avoid Sync, because I tried setting it up on my current WM6.1 phone, and it never worked...so I dropped back to IMAP and checking every 5 minutes.

It's also good to hear that the inboxes are separate. I don't WANT the integrated inbox, and was imagining all my E-mails jumbled together in one. The accounts have a very distinct purpose for each one of them, and seeing all the mail in one place would be jarring.

That's it, as far as I know...probably won't have any more questions until I get the thing!

[SQFreak]

Originally Posted by Inundated Originally Posted by SQFreak Does that answer your question? If not, let me know what you're looking for an answer to. I was trying to avoid Sync, because I tried setting it up on my current WM6.1 phone, and it never worked...so I dropped back to IMAP and checking every 5 minutes.

You can avoid sync and set up GMail accounts to work as IMAP, because the device supports IMAP accounts, and allows separate or combined inboxes for those. When you set up the first Google account (which the phone requires), just turn off syncing entirely. The GMail account will still show up in the GMail application, but you can set up the same account by IMAP and not use it.
I'm not sure why you'd do that because the GMail interface is so excellent on the device and the IMAP interface is kind of meh. It's worth noting that the third-party mail application K9 Mail seems to crash every time I try to launch it, so you may be stuck with the integrated mail interface for now.

[Inundated]

Originally Posted by SQFreak I'm not sure why you'd do that because the GMail interface is so excellent on the device and the IMAP interface is kind of meh. It's worth noting that the third-party mail application K9 Mail seems to crash every time I try to launch it, so you may be stuck with the integrated mail interface for now.

If Sync works, which it didn't with WM (there's a setting somewhere that I couldn't find), I'm fine with that. If I can just use the Menu key in the Gmail app to separate out the accounts, great.