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Google Businesses The Internet

Free IMAP On Gmail 440

Posted by kdawson from the bout-time dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Free IMAP On Gmail More

Free IMAP On Gmail

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  • But... (Score:5, Funny)

    by JK_the_Slacker ( 1175625 ) on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:32PM (#21095269) Homepage
    ... I thought that only Apple would release an iMap? Had me fooled.

    • Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)

      by dwater ( 72834 ) on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:39PM (#21095343)
      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? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jimmyhat3939 ( 931746 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:06AM (#21095551) Homepage
      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? (Score:5, Informative)

        by jimmyhat3939 ( 931746 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:19AM (#21095655) Homepage
        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? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Carthag ( 643047 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @01:02AM (#21095943) Homepage
          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? (Score:5, Informative)

            by abes ( 82351 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @01:25AM (#21096025) Homepage
            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? (Score:5, Informative)

            by master811 ( 874700 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @01:29AM (#21096059)
            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? (Score:4, Funny)

              by laejoh ( 648921 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @05:54AM (#21097315)

              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? (Score:5, Informative)

                by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:05PM (#21100975) Homepage
                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: (Score:3, Informative)

                by phorm ( 591458 )
                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:
                yourusername@gmail.com

                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'

                • Oops, forgot the SSL (Score:3, Informative)

                  by phorm ( 591458 )
                  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: yourusername@gmail.com
                  Use secure connection: TLS

            • 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:Can you use it to upload mails? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by gnuman99 ( 746007 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @02:02AM (#21096259)
          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? (Score:5, Funny)

            by stavros-59 ( 1102263 ) * on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @07:04AM (#21097637)

            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: (Score:3)

            by stu42j ( 304634 )

            I'm sure Google is very happy about it too. Targeted advertising people, targeted advertising.
            Except that if you only ever use IMAP, you never see any ads. I suppose the hope is that most people will use both IMAP and the web interface and that allowing IMAP will increase usage overall.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by I_Love_Pocky! ( 751171 )
              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 sup

  • Well it's about fucking time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:32PM (#21095273) Homepage
    Are they out of "beta" now?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by 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 (Score:4, Funny)

      by dwater ( 72834 ) on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:42PM (#21095365)
      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.
  • 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: (Score:3, Informative)

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

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by wnknisely ( 51017 )
        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.

        • Re:Got me excited there for a minute. (Score:5, Informative)

          by finiteSet ( 834891 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:36AM (#21095757)
          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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by AxemRed ( 755470 )
      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Spikeles ( 972972 )
      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. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @05:06AM (#21097097)
      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. (Score:4, Informative)

      by hondoslack ( 796620 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @01:27PM (#21102135)
      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

  • Size of headers? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Psychor ( 603391 ) on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:37PM (#21095325) Homepage
    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.

  • A bit late... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kadin2048 ( 468275 ) *

      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?

  • Labels or Folders? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:40PM (#21095345)
    I personally hate "Labels", but how will Gmail support something basic like folders?

    • Re:Labels or Folders? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RuBLed ( 995686 ) on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:50PM (#21095433)
      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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dwater ( 72834 )
        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).

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Bronster ( 13157 )
          We still have better support at FastMail though :)

          (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: (Score:3, Informative)

            by dwater ( 72834 )
            > 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 c

        • Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          What is there that you can do with folders but not with labels? I never understood the resistance, personally. I've always considered labels more powerful and therefore better, but maybe I manage things differently than most people--I set up a bunch of filters and now every single message I get is appropriately labeled, then "archived" (so that it doesn't show up in my inbox).

          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 a

    • Re:Labels or Folders? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kadin2048 ( 468275 ) * <.ten.yxox. .ta. .nidak.todhsals.> on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:09AM (#21095583) Homepage Journal

      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? (Score:5, Informative)

      by daemonc ( 145175 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:16AM (#21095633)
      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]
    • Gmail already supports "something as basic as folders". Simply label the e-mail, click archive, and it is in a folder. The only difference is you can have one e-mail be in multiple folders at the same time. By default when you "move" an e-mail into a folder/label Gmail allows you to continue to see that e-mail in your Inbox as well as in that folder/label. If you click archive then you will only see it in that folder/label.

      Your only legitimate gripe is that Gmail doesn't allow you to have the e-mail be arch

    • Re:Labels or Folders? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by the_wesman ( 106427 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:46AM (#21095833) Homepage
      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

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by wdavies ( 163941 )
        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

  • I have it. (Score:5, Informative)

    by vitaflo ( 20507 ) on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:42PM (#21095361) Homepage
    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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by 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. (Score:5, Informative)

      by AWeenieMan ( 1103895 ) on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:48PM (#21095415)
      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.
    • My account is over 3 years old, but I don't see it as an option yet.
    • Same here. I signed up under the blogger.com referral days too.

      It works, it really works!
    • 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.

  • my account was enabled (Score:3, Informative)

    by brjndr ( 313083 ) on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:48PM (#21095409)
    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.
  • I wonder why it took Google so long to implement IMAP. Sometimes I wonder whether Google is becoming so huge and complex that issues as important as IMAP can take so long to implement. This is where Microsoft is at. Sadly.
  • *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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bucky0 ( 229117 )
      I used to do that too, but I had the problem that when I was on the road, if my desktop wasn't on for whatever reason, then my message filters wouldn't run. Which, to me, is the biggest reason I use IMAP(what good are folders if I have to sort all the emails myself?)

  • Some have it, some don't, not totally obvious (Score:5, Informative)

    by Coopjust ( 872796 ) on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:58PM (#21095495)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by asserted ( 818761 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:11AM (#21095595)
      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 :)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )
      My personal GMail account does have it.
      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.

  • You might need to log out/log in (Score:4, Informative)

    by Eagle7 ( 111475 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:02AM (#21095525) Homepage
    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.
  • Or am I just a greedy bastard?
  • Imap can replace web access well enough (e.g. for laptop on the road). But I download multiple gmail accounts from my desktop computer via pop. I don't see how imap could work with multiple accounts. Any ideas?
  • 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

  • Mailbox size jumped too (Score:5, Informative)

    by frdmfghtr ( 603968 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:35AM (#21095753)
    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?

  • New Accounts Come With It? (Score:3, Informative)

    by JStegmaier ( 1051176 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @12:41AM (#21095799)
    Just to test a theory, I created another account on Gmail, and it had IMAP right from the get to.
  • Well, I have been amazed that a company that has snapped up more genius talent than any other on the planet the past few years could not get its head around IMAP. I mean....WOW!

    Its been my biggest complaint about Gmail. I think I wrote in a suggestion 5 minutes after I got my first Gmail account when it was limited to those invitees for "BETA" (which it still says BETA what's with that crazy silly marketing BS anyway....is someone in love with the word BETA over there?)

    Unfortunately, my account does not h

  • Leopard (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sam.thorogood ( 979334 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @02:58AM (#21096543)
    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.

  • In other GMail news.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @03:07AM (#21096575) Homepage
    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!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bertilow ( 218923 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @03:31AM (#21096691) Homepage

    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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Leto-II ( 1509 )
      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'

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by bertilow ( 218923 )

        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!!! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Barraketh ( 630764 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @04:53AM (#21097049)
      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

  • GMail Team on IMAP (Score:3, Informative)

    by nherc ( 530930 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @10:34AM (#21099617) Journal
    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].

  • LDAP (Score:3, Interesting)

    by famebait ( 450028 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @10:56AM (#21099949)
    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.

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