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.

Got me excited there for a minute.

[Kadin2048]

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:Well it's about fucking time

[Laebshade]

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!

I have it.

[vitaflo]

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:I have it.

[UltraMathMan]

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:Got me excited there for a minute.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just checked my two account it appears that my oldest one has the imap link and the newer one doesn't yet

my account was enabled

[brjndr]

I checked and had IMAP enabled, so I changed it on my iPhone too. My iPhone has folders for all my labels now too, and it you click on the folder it downloads the last 50 (or 25, based on your settings) of that label.

Previosly sent mail is in 'sent mail' folder under a 'Gmail' parent folder. Mail sent from the iPhone is in actual 'sent' folder. At least it's not emailing me a copy of my sent mail anymore.

Re:I have it.

[AWeenieMan]

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.

Re:Size of headers?

[HeavyD14]

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.

Old fashioned way to get IMAP

[AncientPC]

*requires own domain

1) Create an e-mail account on your domain dedicated for this one purpose.
2) Forward your gmail account to above account.
3) Access above account via IMAP.

I hate POP3 as I routinely check my e-mail across multiple devices / computers daily. POP3 with server copy just doesn't cut it.

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

[Coopjust]

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.

You might need to log out/log in

[Eagle7]

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.

Re:A bit late...

[Kadin2048]

This would have been nice when I started. Now my gmail inbox is a mess. Currently, my Thunderbird inbox is clean and my gmail account has 20,000 or so unread messages. Does anyone know if it's possible to get google to replace its stuff with mine?

Why wouldn't you just sync up your Gmail account to a folder in Thunderbird (once you have the option, of course), delete everything currently in your account, and then copy the contents of your Thunderbird inbox to it?

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[AxemRed]

Same here... I just checked, and I only have an option available for POP. When I clicked on the "learn more" link, it explained POP and gave me a couple of other links. One of those links was titled "what about IMAP." When I clicked on that, it said that the document was not available. Ya, I would really like IMAP a lot more than pop.

Can you use it to upload mails?

[jimmyhat3939]

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.

being rolled out gradually to random subset users

[asserted]

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 :)

No.

[asserted]

this is really a random fraction, staged rollout. Just wait and you'll have it too in due time :)

Re:Labels or Folders?

[daemonc]

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:Well it's about fucking time

[multipartmixed]

I dunno. POP3 and IMAP4 are both serious enhancements to the MUA experience.

I'd peg UUCP as 1.0 -- straight copying of files and appending to a mailbox on the machine where the mail was read. Mail path directed by sender through well-known hosts.

1.5 would add SMTP, and the ability to deliver over TCP/IP using berkeley name resolution (DNS) without the need for well-known hosts. Mail is still read on the machine it is delivered to.

2.0 seriously enhances the user experience, by allowing the user to retrieve e-mail from a central repository (mail server) to be read by a (potentially offline) MUA via POP2. 2.1 would be POP3, 2.2 would be IMAP, 2.2.3 would be IMAP4.

IMNSHO. :)

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[jimmyhat3939]

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:IMAP over SSL?

[Coopjust]

Yeah, the IMAP connection is secured via SSL.

Mailbox size jumped too

[frdmfghtr]

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?

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[finiteSet]

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.

Yes.

[asserted]

it does.

Re:Labels or Folders?

[dwater]

> We still have better support at FastMail though :)

Indeed, support is excellent. I particularly appreciate the RSS feed to the status weblog, and the fact that is has accurate and honest commentary on any current problems - not that there's much traffic on there, but it happens from time-to-time (nothing that's affected me though - well, not recently).

Kudos on the Cyrus work too, btw. I had a go at implementing it at one point, but the project 'changed direction'[1]

Max.

[1] out-sourced to some provider called Luxsci (also pretty good, IMO) because running a server requires a fair amount of on-hand expertise that we couldn't rely on long-term. I really wanted to use FM - there were some options but you guys weren't geared up for the commercial setup we wanted.

New Accounts Come With It?

[JStegmaier]

Just to test a theory, I created another account on Gmail, and it had IMAP right from the get to.

Have it too, even does SSL

[Mr. Arbusto]

I've been wondering for a while if they'd roll out IMAP, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the supported SSL for IMAP. For them I'm certain the overhead is marginal, it's still a nice mail service.....if you don't mind the google indexing your mail.

IMAP: switch to "English (US)" interface language

[frik85]

You have to switch your language to "English (US)" to get the IMAP options in your GMail settings.

Other interface languages will get the update and therefore the translation sync later, as usual.

Re:The more suckers the better !!

[garbletext]

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:Can you use it to upload mails?

[abes]

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]

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:imap with multiple accounts?

[afidel]

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.

Re:IMAP: switch to "English (US)" interface langua

[soilheart]

Well. I have English (US) and no IMAP options. So it's probably not only that right now.

Re:Labels or Folders?

[wdavies]

Not a huge loss? I have folders with dozens of entries. If I didnt have folder hierarchies I would be fucked in browse only mode. Therea subtle distinction: For example:
I could have a Work folder from John, and a Friends folder with a John Sub-folder. Tags alone cant fix that, unless they are nestable. I'd end up having to create a Work_John label inside a Work tag...

True, Each to their own organization style. But Googles tags SUCK ass for this philosophy.

Also -- I have been completely unable to fix their TAG and THREAD conflation. Lets say I send a 100 emails for a wedding invite. I'd like a filter that would apply 'bounced_wedding_invite' tags. But if you do this, ALL replies in the thread get this tag. God knows who does their QA, or whether their PM's have any sense of usability.
I've tried to get it fixed thru friends at Google, but as far as I know it still sucks. Which is why I'm sticking with Good Ole Eudora and POP gmail.

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[Spikeles]

To get IMAP to show up you need to change your GMAIL Display language to "English(US)" in the "General" Tab.

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[eealex]

I don't know about your case, but when I changed my language settings from Japanese the English(US) the IMAP option comes out!

In other GMail news....

[moosesocks]

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.

Re:Well it's about fucking time

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignoring uucp (most people do), I think the more accurate characterization is:

email beta: SMTP released [1]
email 1.0: POP released (two years later) [2]
email 2.0: IMAP released (four years later) [3]

[1] August 1982, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821 [ietf.org]
[2] October 1984, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc918 [ietf.org]
[3] July 1988, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1064 [ietf.org]

(Yes, there's a history as to why that's IMAP2 and not IMAP1)

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[Cardcaptor_RLH85]

That probably just refreshed your pages to bring up the IMAP option. Switching from English(US) to English(UK), saving the changes, and changing back, did absolutely nothing for me ^_^

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

[Leto-II]

I've got a bunch of UTF-8 (with Chinese characters) and GB2312 (also Chinese) encoded emails that worked just fine. But then I've got some others with the same encoding that don't work, and have ? as you said. The only difference I can see is that the mails that work used base64 content-transfer-encoding and the ones that didn't work just use straight 8-bit content-transfer-encoding.

All the mails I sent myself through Gmail look fine. Lots that I received look fine. But there's some I received that don't work.

Whether this will be fixed or not I dunno... But it's not all broken as you said.

Re:Size of headers?

[empaler]

YMMV, but GCALDaemon [sourceforge.net] will set you up, The guides were all made before they made a GUI configurator (GCALDaemon/bin/config-editor.sh), which makes it so easy it ought to be a crime. HTH :)

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

[bertilow]

But it's not all broken as you said.

True. After searching through my messages I managed to find a few that have not been totally destroyed. But it's still broken enough, I'd say, like "several thousand e-mails turned into garbage"-broken.

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

[Barraketh]

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:Got me excited there for a minute.

[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.

[smurfsurf]

I got the setting ones I logged out and logged in again. Try it, perhaps it works for you as well.

Re:IMAP WEEE!!!

[KiloByte]

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

[flynns]

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:The more suckers the better !!

[dakameleon]

Equivalent to 1st class mail is encrypted email - email sent "in the clear" bounces around so many servers that might do something else with it (like filing away a copy in the interests of "ensuring delivery"), you should assume that it's more or less public. You're concerned about things hanging around just on the gmail server? Welcome to the digital age.

Re:Mailbox size jumped too

[maxume]

They recently sped it up:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-gmail-storage-coming-for-all.html [blogspot.com]

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:You don't need Outlook for either of those

[InvisiBill]

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.

Thunderbird can access Hotmail and other webmail accounts with the Webmail extension [mozdev.org]. I'm using it to access my Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. Likewise, Exchange is usually configured to support POP and/or IMAP, meaning any decent mail client can pull emails from it. See http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Connecting_POP_And_IMAP_Clients_To_MS_Exchange_Server.html [msexchange.org] for details. That won't give you access to all the other features, but it will let you get to your mailbox.

Re:Mailbox size jumped too

[Mini-Geek]

Slashdot posted this article several days ago.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/13/111211 [slashdot.org]

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[An ominous Cow art]

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

GMail Team on IMAP

[nherc]

The GMail Team has finally officially commented on the addition of IMAP to GMail on the public About GMail "What's New" page [google.com].

Also, the Official Gmail Blog [blogspot.com] has more information on the Gmail IMAP implementation and how it works across devices [blogspot.com].

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[jbarr]

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?

[phorm]

Thunderbird works just fine (and a lot better than Outlook) for IMAP. When you go into settings to enable IMAP, there's a little link below that will detail for you how to use IMAP with gmail from common email apps (including Thunderbird).

The servers are:
imap.gmail.com
smtp.gmail.com

The username fields are:
[e-mail]

Once you've added a gmail account to thunderbird, you can add your other IMAP/POP3 accounts (if you haven't already), and drag+drop email between them and gmail.

Well, that's the theory anyhow. Right now the gmail IMAP server is a bit slow and won't actually let me in... probably being slashdotted :-)
However, I've done the same between various POP3/IMAP accounts before (note that if you drag from IMAP to POP3 it won't appear on other machines with the same POP3 account, since mail in that format stores on the local machine).

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[hondoslack]

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:Can you use it to upload mails?

[zkam]

IMAP Behavior Chart from gmail help:
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77657 [google.com]

Oops, forgot the SSL

[phorm]

Just to add to that. I missed a few steps.
Set the following option under "server settings"/"security settings"

Use secure connection: SSL

You'll also want to add the smtp server:
Server Name: smtp.gmail.com
Port: 587
Username and Password: [e-mail]
Use secure connection: TLS

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[ejasons]

That probably just refreshed your pages to bring up the IMAP option. Switching from English(US) to English(UK), saving the changes, and changing back, did absolutely nothing for me ^_^

Interestingly, it did work for me. I didn't have the IMAP option, changed to English-UK, then back to English-US, and the IMAP option was there...