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Mobile Gmail for apps on non-mobile browsers
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It’s typical Easter time in Greece, when families get together to do two things: eat and have a good time together. The latter usually involves laughing out loud and generally making a lot of noise. The food part almost always includes slaughtering a lamb and roasting it whole over charcoal and quite usually a Kokoretsi as well. I’m vegetarian for some time now, nevertheless I wouldn’t miss it for the world. It’s like watching “My big fat greek wedding”… live.
So I’m packing to drive to my favorite Nafplion (greek: Ναύπλιο) for a couple of days. To pin-point it on the map, it will sufficve to say it’s quite close to SPARTAAA.
Checklist:
- Awesome weather: Best time of the year baby! Check.
- Playlists ready with Travis, James, etc. Check.
- Cworth‘s Icehouse and Zendo pieces packed. Check.
- Let folks know I’ll be mostly offline. Check.
- Mobile Internet connectivity for mails etc. Hmph.
There are a number of good café in the city with good connectivity, but we’ll be staying at our camper most of the time. I’m on volume-charged mobile GPRS connectivity, however, code development won’t be much of a problem (thank you Mercurial and ssh). But, the scenario breaks when it comes to Gmail.
I’m using Google apps, and both the browsers of my Thinkpad and maemo are recognized as full (non-mobile) browsers by Gmail. Reading your email with the normal Gmail interface on a slow mobile connection could be a bit painful, both in terms of usability and cost. I don’t think mutt over IMAP will help me in saving bandwidth. I hear Google provides mobile phones with a java app to “supercharge” the browse-your-emails experience, however I’m not very keen for it, and besides, it’s not provided for Maemo.
So, I need a way to access the mail component of my app-for-your-domain with a normal browser, but see the mobile version of it. Light, low-bandwidth, and slick for 4″ screens. Albeit, no luck in finding a link/URL for it. This service just doesn’t exist in docs. For normal Gmail, m.gmail.com and an appended
/mdoes work, it doesn’t work for custom domains. I tried various URL/variable combinations using a normal browser, and I always got redirected to the normal version or plain Gmail (no apps). Maybe the Google folks are still testing mobile versions for custom apps, or I might have really missed something in my search.After a while searching the Web and trying various stuff (
/m/,m.google.com/a/...,?ui=mobile, …) I saw at a point a/xappended in the URL of mobile Gmail on normal apps. Hey, that might work on Google apps as well. And yes, it does, and it’s ridiculously simple.http://mail.google.com/a/your_domain/x/
Victorious.
Off to find my shades, prepare a freddo espresso, and hit the road.
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noon, Πέμπτη 24 Απριλίου 2008
[ FOSS, linux, Tech/web ] |
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