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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 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.
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.
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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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!!!!!
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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.
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.
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.
Barraketh
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.