Free IMAP On Gmail 440
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.
Well it's about fucking time (Score:3, Insightful)
A bit late... (Score:2, Insightful)
Possibly unrelated... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Labels or Folders? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
(yes, I do work for FastMail - was wondering if we'd get mentioned in this thread)
Oh - and we're responsible for most of the bugfixing that's happened in the past few releases of Cyrus thanks to being early adopters and thanks to me spending far too much time reading C code for my sanity.
Re:IMAP WEEE!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
That way, the few things left unclassified await me in the inbox (and I can filter them if need be), but everything else is under an appropriate label (and because I mark *everything* as read once I'm done with it, it doesn't really matter that there's one message with two or more labels).
Re:Labels or Folders? (Score:5, Insightful)
-w
Re:The more suckers the better !! (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Why? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The more suckers the better !! (Score:1, Insightful)
For ever is a long, long time. I think suckers sums it up nicely, though willing suckers would be more apt.
Re:The more suckers the better !! (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Size of headers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thought not.
I assume that it will take up to a week for them to roll it out to everyone.
Re:Some have it, some don't, not totally obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
My personal domain G Apps account does not.
1 of the 3 G Apps domain accounts that my company has does have it.
The other reply said 'it's random, don't look for a pattern' but I've done major rollouts, and doing it randomly is a serious headache. I think it's much more likely they're doing it by server and if your account is on a server they've rolled out, you've got it. It'll look random, but won't really be.
Re:Got me excited there for a minute. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The more suckers the better !! (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
That said, it is possible to combine both, like in Lotus Notes. It calls them folders, but they are actually nested tags.
iPhone support? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:IMAP WEEE!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:imap with multiple accounts? (Score:1, Insightful)
Outlook IMAP support sucks ass. It works, but it's a kludge: they took the POP way of doing things and wrapped an IMAP protocol handler around it. Entourage and Thunderbird are quite good. Mail.app is so-so, but if you get any kind of lag on the connection things are unworkable: it tends to cache too aggressively which slows things down in the foreground when it should happen transparently in the background (there's no IDLE support either).
Re:The more suckers the better !! (Score:2, Insightful)