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I’ve set up my google apps email account using imap in mail.app and it’s working quite well in terms of keeping track of read and unread emails and having my sent emails available everywhere.

It’s definitely worth going one step beyond google’s own instructions on the matter and correctly configuring the drafts, sent and trash folders in both clients:

Mail.app

Choose the google folder for drafts in the sidebar. From the os x menu bar at the top of your screen choose ‘mailbox’ and then ‘use this mailbox for’ and then ‘drafts’. Do the same with the other folders.

iPhone Mail

Having done the basic setup, go to the settings app, choose ‘mail, contacts and calendars’, navigate to your mail account and choose ‘advanced’ and then setup the ‘mailbox behaviours’ as required.

NB if you are a fan of ‘labels’ in gmail, bear in mind that these equate to copies of the email in IMAP folders. That means that if you have, as I did, several thousand labelled emails from a different account you will have more than one copy of each downloaded to mail.app, assuming you chose to download your messages- and who wouldn’t?

The iPhone seems to work pretty flawlessly, but mail.app sometimes seems to take a while to catch up with changes (especially emails you’ve read on the iPhone while mail.app was offline) although it always seems to get there in the end.

If you are a fan of GTD, use a Mac and an iPhone, then there’s a great pair of apps you can get that seamlessly sync all your projects and tasks, and that will update your iCal while you’re at it.

Things from Cultured Code also comes as an iPhone app, and the duo update each other fairly well. They miss out on being being “excellent” because the iPhone-to-mac syncing only happens when both your devices are on the same wifi network, and short of closing one of the pair and re-opening it, I can’t fnd a way of forcing a sync to happen whenever you would like.

That being said, they do both work extremely well. The desktop version has a very nice quick-entry interface which feels a little bit like Quicksilver (and is accessed by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Space) which is a nice touch. Both apps use “dock badge” numbers although the number shown can only be customised on the desktop version which lets you set the number as Due, Due+Today and Due+Today+Inbox; the iPhone dock badge will only show Due+Today so personally although I would like the full count I leave the setting so that both are the same.

Neither app is free. The desktop client is (at the current exchange rate) £37.13 ($49.95) and you can buy Things from the App Store for £5.99 ($7.99). The desktop version is also available as a 5-license bundle for £55.72 ($74.95)