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"I read your tutorial on how to sync Outlook Calendar and Contacts with Gmail and the T-Mobile G1, but you didn't cover syncing your Outlook mail with Gmail. I've got about 50 folders and 5 years of mail in Outlook. How do I get all that old mail into Gmail and keep both in Outlook and Gmail in sync?"

I didn't originally cover how to keep Gmail and my G1 in sync because at first I was attempting to continue using Outlook as a POP3 email client, while also accessing my mail from the Gmail Web interface and from my G1. This was a horrible idea from a time management perspective. Outlook treated all messages downloaded from Gmail as new mail, even if I'd already read it online or on my phone. The solution takes a couple of steps that require an initial upfront investment of time, that pays huge dividends later.

As I fumbled with moving the hundreds of Contacts in my Outlook to my new Android phone, I discovered there's no easy way to delete all contacts directly from the phone. From the T-mobile G1 interface, you have to manually select each contact and delete them individually, which takes a long time. The alternative, which can be a little scary, is to delete all the contacts from Gmail and wait for the phone to re-sync. If you no longer have any contacts in Gmail, you'll also no longer have any contacts on your phone. So the solution to deleting all the contacts on your G1 is to sign in to Gmail on your PC, go to the contacts page, select all contacts and delete them.

"How can I sync my T-Mobile G1 Google Android phone with my Outlook contacts and calendar automatically?"

Knowing that Google provides a great free solution for syncing Outlook with Google Calendar automatically, I was extremely hopeful they had finally offered a solid solution for managing contacts between Outlook and Gmail. So far, Google's only automatic solution involves syncing Outlook with iTunes, which is great if you have an iPhone, but kind of inconvenient for an Android phone, especially since you need an iPod for it to work. After trying several of the free solutions, including GCalDaemon, which acts as a local server for your contacts, I concluded I'd rather pay for the reliability of an app I'd recommended in the past, CompanionLink.