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.

Size of headers?

[Psychor]

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.

Labels or Folders?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Labels or Folders?

[RuBLed]

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.

my google hosted domain does, regular doesn't

[boredandblogging]

My regular [e-mail] doesn't show it, but the domain I host with google (the non-premium stuff) has it.

Re:Labels or Folders?

[dwater]

I don't much like the labels either.

I've been a satisfied Fastmail [fastmail.fm] user for several years now. Apart from gmail being free (FM has free accounts too, but they're ad supported or something - I pay for their premium service), I don't see any advantage in their interface.

I wonder if this new imap service will help people who already have stuff in folders (like me) move to gmail? I tried gmail a while ago and it was a pain to set it up to do the same as fastmail was doing automatically (ie use plus-addressing). Perhaps I'll give it another try, afterall, free is good.

Re:Got me excited there for a minute.

[wnknisely]

Same here. The account I set up back when Gmail was only available to blogger users is now IMAP enabled. The Google App accounts are still POP only. Hopefully it will only be a couple of days till they're all IMAP capable.

Anyone seen support for IMAP IDLE functionality ?

[slincolne]

Has anyone seen if this supports the IMAP IDLE [isode.com] mode of operating ?

This is where your clients stay connected, and the server notifies the mail client when there is mail waiting, rather than having the client repeatedly polling the server.

If/when they get this working it will be fantastic for those of us with mobile devices who can't afford a high end data plan.

PS - if you have a Gmail account, and you can't see the IMAP option in settings, log completely out of gmail, close the browser window, and then connect and check again - that's all it took for me to find this nice new feature ;-)

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[Carthag]

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?

[gnuman99]

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.

Depends on interface language

[tokul]

US English shows up as POP/IMAP and has IMAP options. Russian shows up as POP and does not have IMAP options.

Re:Labels or Folders?

[Beavertank]

Except that it does kind of matter, at least to me. I'm connecting to my Gmail account using my palm and Agendus mail and it wants to pull 4000-some emails (400mb worth, I don't want 400mb worth of old emails on my palm thanks). I've tried labeling everything that comes in now as "New" and telling it to pull only things from the "New" folder but it doesn't quite work like that because its a label, not a folder.

Doing it over POP was annoying, but still useful when I was away from useful computers for long periods but still needed to be in touch, IMAP should have solved all the POP issues I'm sure everyone has run into... except now, to do it, I either have to pull 4k emails or delete all of my old archives.

So yeah, folders are (sometimes) important to end users. Thanks.

If, by some rare chance, someone figures out how to make labels work exactly as folders do (at least in the eyes of portable mail clients) I might just kiss you... assuming you share the method with me.

Leopard

[sam.thorogood]

This co-incides slightly with Mac OS X Leopard, in that, the instructional video talked about "how easy it was to automatically use GMail accounts in Mail. Well, I think support by Google may have been pivotal.

Warning: Gmail IMAP support is ASCII only!!!

[bertilow]

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!!!

[Bronster]

Hey, fantastic to see a response. Even though you guys are opening up right into a major segment of our customer base (I work for FastMail.FM, and good IMAP access is one of our selling points, so much so that I spend a lot of my time enhancing and bugfixing Cyrus), I'm glad that IMAP is an option for Gmail users, because IMAP is an all round better protocol than POP3 for serious use (and people are less likely to lose email if the only copy isn't on a flaky laptop hard drive somewhere).

That said, IMAP doesn't map well to gmail's style of doing things already, and it's also less of a fit to how people would _like_ to use email generally. Single mailbox IDLE, no "submit" command that both sends an email out and copies to your Sent mailbox, etc.

Do you know if Google has any plans to develop a newer protocol, and if so if you'd be willing to share it so a larger base of implementations could develop around it? Unfortunately I have both a young family and a non-existant travel budget so I can't easily get to the conferences, but I'm really interested in improving mail access protocols to keep non-centralised email relevant in these days of Facebook and similar services sucking users into them.

LDAP

[famebait]

Very cool.

Now just to sound like an annoying ingrate, here's my remaining list:
* LDAP-access to the contacts
* mobile sync for calendar
* mobile sync for contacts, notes, etc.

Re:Can you use it to upload mails?

[I_Love_Pocky!]

I suppose the hope is that most people will use both IMAP and the web interface and that allowing IMAP will increase usage overall.

Well certainly. Gmail's interface still far exceeds any traditional mail client. Using Outlook at work is the worst experience in my day. The benefit of imap is that I will be able to use my iPhone properly until the SDK is released, when hopefully Google will be able to develop a 3rd party client for my phone.

Does anyone know of any mail experience available that is superior to gmail?