Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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!
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.
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 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.
*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.
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.
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.
_sig_ is away
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
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
this is really a random fraction, staged rollout. Just wait and you'll have it too in due time :)
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
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
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.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Yeah, the IMAP connection is secured via SSL.
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?
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
it does.
> 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.
Max.
Just to test a theory, I created another account on Gmail, and it had IMAP right from the get to.
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.
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.
My favourite operating system is ReactOS; binary compatible to WinNT series
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.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Well. I have English (US) and no IMAP options. So it's probably not only that right now.
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.
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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
[2] October 1984, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc918
[3] July 1988, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1064
(Yes, there's a history as to why that's IMAP2 and not IMAP1)
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.
Do not anger the worm.
YMMV, but GCALDaemon 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 :)
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.
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 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
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
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.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Thunderbird can access Hotmail and other webmail accounts with the Webmail extension. 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 for details. That won't give you access to all the other features, but it will let you get to your mailbox.
The GMail Team has finally officially commented on the addition of IMAP to GMail on the public About GMail "What's New" page.
Also, the Official Gmail Blog has more information on the Gmail IMAP implementation and how it works across devices.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
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