Free IMAP On Gmail

A number of readers are writing in to tell us that Google is rolling out IMAP support for Gmail accounts. Several people say that some of their gmail accounts offer the IMAP option (in Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP) and others do not.

But...

[JK_the_Slacker (1175625)]

... I thought that only Apple would release an iMap? Had me fooled.

Re:But...

[dwater (72834)]

Nope, google beat them to it, even though they are gSlow. They really dropped the iBall on this one.

Can you use it to upload mails?

[jimmyhat3939 (931746)]

One of the deficiencies of gmail has been that it's very painful to put all your old emails into it. I'm thinking maybe imap will fix this. I happen to be one of the lucky ones who got imap, so I'll keep you posted.

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[jimmyhat3939 (931746)]

Ok I just tested it. In fact you *can* use this to upload emails!!! hooray! Now I can use gmail as my primary/only email repository!!!!!

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[Carthag (643047)]

Care to give a bit more details on how you do this? I wouldn't want to accidentally delete all my mails and have to look through backups.

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[abes (82351)]

There's an option in the settings to pull email from up to 5 (?) sources on the GMail page. There are several settings that allow you to optionally move or copy the emails. I did the move option, so I could check if any mail didn't make it across.

On the whole it worked great, EXCEPT that the date of the mail got messed up, it took the entire day, and the order was a bit strange. I ended up having to sort by date sent rather than date received. It was also a big pain in the ass to get random mail from my old account throughout the day.

On the other hand, once it was finished, I had stored 5 years of emails from my school account. There's still a few emails that never made the transfer, and I'm not completely sure why yet.

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[master811 (874700)]

You'll need Outlook. Any version will do I think, other email clients might work though in my experience Outlook Express doesn't work and neither does the Windows Live Mail client. Thunderbird should work though, but of course if you have a hotmail account or you use exchange, your only option will be to use Outlook. Basically with Outlook simply copy/move your folders (right click or drag) that you need from an existing imap/pop/mapi account whatever and put them into the google imap account. It should be that simple, of course it'll mean uploading the email you copy, so if you have a lot of it or are on a slow connection it will take time.

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[laejoh (648921)]

You'll need Outlook.

I'm on Debian, you insensitive clod!

That's the non-free repository, no?

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[jbarr (2233)]

Your coment was funny, but for those who may not know, on the IMAP Settings screen in Gmail is a link to instructions on how to configure Thunderbird and several other email clients. Here's the direct link: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77662 [google.com]

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[gnuman99 (746007)]

I'm sure Google is very happy about it too. Targeted advertising people, targeted advertising.

So maybe good for NSA and other 3 letter agencies - they don't even have to try to intercept email these days anymore. People store it conveniently for them on Google.

gmail, hotmail, instant messanger, facebook, myspace, slashdot, etc. The distributed Internet has become very modular these days. People are worried about root DNS hosts. Imagine what people would do if you took down only a handful of these domains. 1/2 the people online would be lost.

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[stavros-59 (1102263)]

gmail, hotmail, instant messanger, facebook, myspace, slashdot, etc. The distributed Internet has become very modular these days. People are worried about root DNS hosts. Imagine what people would do if you took down only a handful of these domains. 1/2 the people online would be lost.

So it wouldn't be all bad then

Re:The more suckers the better !!

[garbletext (669861)]

Right, but they can build a program to do it, then have the robot summarize the most salient points of your life, from a marketing perspective, to whoever. Manually reading everyone's email would be tedious. Google has developed advanced tools so they can profit off you without needing to.

Re:The more suckers the better !!

[Khaed (544779)]

Except they only profit off me if I use their free service, or e-mail someone who does.

Also, gmail or not, anyone who e-mails anything even remotely private is an idiot. Google reading e-mail is the least concerning part of any unencrypted e-mail. It always strikes me as really odd when people complain about what Google does to the equivalent of electronic postcards.

Re:The more suckers the better !!

[Ephemeriis (315124)]

Right. The Post office archives all postcards for later access, any time, any place, ... for ever and ever. But then it goes one further - it opens my, I had assumed because I knew no better, 1st class mail (or any kind for that matter), and DOES THE SAME TO IT.

Standard cleartext email, the kind of stuff that all email clients send by default, is basically a plain text file. There is no encapsulation or encryption at all. There is nothing preventing anyone and everyone along the way from reading it - much like a post card.

If you don't want anyone reading your email you can use any number of encryption tools to make it harder for unintended recipients to read it - but not impossible.

And if you're worried about Google retaining a copy of every email... Well, so can every single mail server that touches that message. As it gets relayed from one server to the next there is absolutely no guarantee that your message is not retained. There may very well be servers out there retaining copies for all of eternity...backing them up to tape...printing them out...

Quite simply, if you are concerned about security and/or privacy, email is the last way you want to communicate with anyone.

Re:The more suckers the better !!

[Bert64 (520050)]

Yes, they can build a program to process the mails you are sending through their service and target you with ads...
If you have an issue with an automated process accessing your mail and taking actions based on the content of it, you'd better not use a spam filter either... Infact, you probably shouldnt use email at all unless you can find a mail server which isnt a program.

Re:But...

[nuzak (959558)]

No, Brooklyn ends in "fuckin' a". Actually most things from there end in fuckin' a.

Well it's about fucking time

[Junior J. Junior III (192702)]

Are they out of "beta" now?

Re:

[Laebshade (643478)]

Still in beta, but this is great news. I use gmail exclusively, and came to the realization, as others had already pointed out, that doing so is foolish. Imap support will make it easier to make full backups. Just last week I did a complete backup with a linux box and pop3 access to the gmail (with getmail/tar/bzip2). Now I can just keep an imap client running on my home system to constantly keep copies of the mail (once I get the imap option in gmail, that is). Thanks Google!

Re:Well it's about fucking time

[dwater (72834)]

Google are experts on the whole Web-2.0 thing - it's good to see them finally getting hang of the Email-1.0 thing too.

Got me excited there for a minute.

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

I just went and checked; no IMAP option for me. Just the usual POP ones.

It'd be nice to get IMAP, though. Right now I basically only do Gmail from one machine, because when I access it from another one, either via Gmail's web interface or via a standalone POP client, everything gets screwed up. There's no tracking of which messages I read through the web interface when I later get them via POP, and emails that I send through the web pop up in my Inbox in Mail later. It's okay if I'm going to be away for a while, say on vacation or something, but it's obnoxious enough that if I'm away for a day or so, I just let it go.

IMAP would be a huge step up.

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[by Anonymous Coward]

FYI, I don't have an 'IMAP option'. But it still works...

Just configure your client to use imap.gmail.com as the server, with SSL enabled.

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[An ominous Cow art (320322)]

I just tried setting up my gmail account as IMAP in Thunderbird, but got an error that "IMAP is not enabled for this account".

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[hondoslack (796620)]

From google help: "Don't fret if you don't see "IMAP Access" yet under the Settings menu. We're rolling it out to everyone over the next few days." RTFM

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[finiteSet (834891)]

IMAP is an option for me and I only registered my Gmail account a month or so ago. I put off getting a Gmail account for quite some time only because it lacked IMAP support - I couldn't be happier with this development.

Size of headers?

[Psychor (603391)]

Not sure exactly how they're going to implement this, since I can't see the option in my account as yet. I would imagine they'd have to limit it somehow though, since for accounts with thousands and thousands of emails sitting around in them like mine, the size of even downloading the headers via IMAP would be fairly prohibitive?

I would guess they'll limit support to a few hundred of the latest mails only or something like that, but if anyone has checked it out and has any information that'd be useful.

Re:Size of headers?

[HeavyD14 (898751)]

I went in and downloaded every header from my All Mail folder, right from "Gmail is different, here is what you need to know" from 3 years ago to my latest email from 2 minutes ago. It took a minute or two, but they all came through.

Re:Size of headers?

[cheater512 (783349)]

Ever turned on a new feature on a few hundred thousand servers?
Thought not.

I assume that it will take up to a week for them to roll it out to everyone.

Re:Size of headers?

[Jay L (74152)]

Ever misdirected your snark at a reply instead of the original post?

Thought so.

Labels or Folders?

[by Anonymous Coward]

I personally hate "Labels", but how will Gmail support something basic like folders?

Re:Labels or Folders?

[RuBLed (995686)]

Isn't that the same? And you could tag a single mail with multiple labels, which is essentially like making a shortcut on every folder/label? I use very basic labels but yes I agree, labels should have an option to have a folder like interface.

Re:Labels or Folders?

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

I personally hate "Labels", but how will Gmail support something basic like folders?

Well, since you can do everything you can do with Folders, with Labels, I expect it really won't be that hard.

All you need to do for a 'folder' is have a label that says "present in xyz folder." So to put a message in a folder you just tag it with that, and then the 'folder' itself is just a view that only shows messages with that tag. How the messages are actually stored on disk is irrelevant to the user. This means you can use database storage schemes that are much more efficient for large sites than flat files.

The obvious advantage to a user of tags vs folders is that you can have a single message in more than one psuedo-folder in a tag-based system; in a true folder-based system, you either need to make a copy of the message in order to store it in two folders, or you need to do something nasty with symlinks/pointers.

Re:Labels or Folders?

[daemonc (145175)]

I wondered that myself, but don't have the option to try it out yet. Fortunately Google did a good job of explaining the Label to Folder mapping here: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77657 [google.com]

Re:Labels or Folders?

[the_wesman (106427)]

hi - no offense to your viewpoint, but I find this unfathomable - at work, we use ms outlook/exchange and I despise organizing things into folders - the reason is that some things are applicable to multiple categories - for example, my company has multiple software products and each has a build and automated test cycle - so when product B is built, I get an e-mail about the build, and when it's smoke tested, I get another e-mail - I would like to label these as "product B" (for both e-mails) and "build results" and "test results" for the others, respectively - seems to me that you only gain functionality this way - using gmail's implementation as an example: you can then click on the label that says "product b" and see all the stuff (build and test results) for that product exactly the same way you would as if there were folders ... actually, I just thought of a difference: you don't get a folder hierarchy ... dunno, that doesn't seem like a huge loss to me - is that why you prefer folders? seriously - I'm baffled as to why anyone would prefer folders vs a label/tag system.... to each his own - cheers
-w

I have it.

[vitaflo (20507)]

Shows up on mine. Given I was a very early adopter of gmail, I wonder if they aren't doling it out to the old timers first.

Re:

[UltraMathMan (1139987)]

Sweet me too! Don't know if I'll use it or not though, I kind of like the interface - or perhaps it's that I'm just used to it :)

Re:I have it.

[AWeenieMan (1103895)]

I have the option on an account that is about 18 months old and another one that is about a month old. So, it doesn't seem to be related to when accounts were created.

Some have it, some don't, not totally obvious

[Coopjust (872796)]

OK, some interesting bits:

-My Gmail account created late 2004 has it, as well as a friend from a month later.
-My Gmail account created summer 2005 does NOT have it.
-My "Google Apps for your domain" account, late 2006, has it, admins and regular users.
-Unlike typical announcements, it's not showing in the upper right. You have to go into your preferences. If you see a "Forwarding & POP" tab, you lack it. If you see a "Forwarding & POP/IMAP" tab...obviously, you have it.
-All your labels become Subfolders in a "[Gmail]" folder that sits next to your inbox. It also has the spam and All Mail folders (If you have a lot of email, it understandably take FOREVER to load the first time--- "Processing 1 of 7000 email headers")


It's a great move that's likely to keep me on Gmail, but it seems to play a lot nicer with Outlook 2003 on Win XP Pro than Evolution on Ubuntu Gutsy.One email account is perfect, the other is horrible, and other than the username they have the same exact settings. The one that doesn't work has 600 email headers to download, and the other one downloaded 7,000 in a snap.

being rolled out gradually to random subset users

[asserted (818761)]

no point in looking for rollout patterns, user participation is being gradually ramped up and it's done in subsets of users that are basically random.
at some point roll out will reach 100% and everyone will have the option. a little more patience is all that is needed :)

You might need to log out/log in

[Eagle7 (111475)]

I did not have IMAP in my account when I checked (as soon as it was posted on /.). I logged out of Gmail, and logged back in, and suddenly the option was there in settings. YMMV (but hopefully it will work).

I'm curious how they are implementing labels equaling folders... I see folders in Apple Mail for all my labels, and I see labels messages in my Inbox and in the label folder. I haven't started trying use cases to figure out how deleting, moving, and copying messages in Mail relates to the labels in Gmail.

Mailbox size jumped too

[frdmfghtr (603968)]

Recently my mailbox capacity was approaching 3 GB...it seems to have taken a big jump to 4.3 GB in the last week or two. ANybodty else notice a capacity jump?

In other GMail news....

[moosesocks (264553)]

Offtopic, but Google's been making some other new changes to GMail over the past few weeks. The most noticeable of them is that the disk space counter has been sped up dramatically. I'm at 4.3GB right now, which is close to 1.5 times as much space as I had two weeks ago.

Warning: Gmail IMAP support is ASCII only!!!

[bertilow (218923)]

I just tried the new shiny IMAP support in Gmail. All my messages seemed to download quickly and easily, and all seemed well. But a closer look revealed the horrible truth: All non-ASCII characters in all messages (received or sent) have turned into question marks (two or more for each character). So beware!

It seems that Google have fired all employees that know anything about character encoding issues. Google used to do such things very well, but that is falling apart in a very ugly way. Google Groups was the major example, but now Gmail IMAP has probably taken its place as the major Google character encoding debacle. If it weren't for the fact that the Google Groups character encoding bugs (major bugs!) have remained unsolved (with no reaction whatsoever from the programmers) for a very long time now, I would have supposed that these IMAP bugs will quickly be solved. But I'm not very optimistic, actually.

Re:Warning: Gmail IMAP support is ASCII only!!!

[Barraketh (630764)]

I work for Google, so I know for a fact that we have not "fired all employees that know anything about character encoding issues". We have an internationalization team which works with most customer facing Google products. I personally have tried this with foreign emails written in KOI8-R, UTF-8, GB2312, and ISO-8859-1 charsets. Please go to here [google.com] to contact the gmail team with this issue, or you can reply to me directly with more details (specifically which character set and content transfer encoding were used in the mangled emails), and I will forward your issue to the right people.

Barraketh

Re:Warning: Gmail IMAP support is ASCII only!!!

[flynns (639641)]

You have to click through a couple menus so that they send your problem to the right place. Here, try this link: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=gtag_headers&ctx=gtag_headers&bug_topic=Incoming+Encoding+Garbled&submit=Click+here+to+report+your+issue [google.com].

Re:IMAP WEEE!!!

[cs (15509)]

You write:

I always wondered why they chose POP over IMAP in the first place.

I'm only guessing, but think about the server resource usage. Everything they offer at present (web, pop) involves a client connecting, sucking briefly, and letting go. IMAP connections tend to be much longer lived, and that's a serious allocation issue with millions of users.

Re:IMAP WEEE!!!

[KiloByte (825081)]

To the contrary -- IMAP connections persist but take nothing but an entry in a kernel + daemon table. POP has to make the full TCP handshake, SSL handshake, POP login, check the mail and disconnect every freaking 10 minutes. Even if there's some sort of keepalives to involved, they're a single packet in both ways instead of a full connection with authentication and what not.

Re:IMAP WEEE!!!

[Sancho (17056)]

I'm sure that no small part of it was designing a way to handle the protocol. Since Gmail does labels instead of folders and archives mail to remove it from the inbox, it definitely acts a bit differently from the way that we traditionally think of mail. Mapping those functions to IMAP functions was probably non-obvious.

Re:IMAP over SSL?

[Coopjust (872796)]

Yeah, the IMAP connection is secured via SSL.

Re:IMAP over SSL?

[AVee (557523)]

You've got to wonder, is that a security measure or anti-competitive behaviour. "It's our user, only we get to read his email."

Re:imap with multiple accounts?

[afidel (530433)]

Use an MUA that doesn't suck? Even Outlook 2003 supports multiple IMAP accounts. Thunderbird has supported it since the Netscape Communicator 4 days. Actually I can't think of a client off the top of my head that supports IMAP and doesn't support multiple profiles.