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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.
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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 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.
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.
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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.
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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
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
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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?
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it does.
Just to test a theory, I created another account on Gmail, and it had IMAP right from the get to.
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.
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Well. I have English (US) and no IMAP options. So it's probably not only that right now.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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