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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.
Are they out of "beta" now?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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?
I was helping someone use the Gmail chat feature and it magically dawned on me how much gmail kicks the crap out of Hotmail, I have some old Hotmail accounts and I was skeptical to move over to Gmail, but since I have I wondered how I ever used Hotmail. Man when I was a kid it was the email that your ISP gave you.....Well whatever will be will be!
To see a few of my Android apps goto: www.hartwired.com
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 cs@cskk.id.au http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
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 an appropriate label (and because I mark *everything* as read once I'm done with it, it doesn't really matter that there's one message with two or more labels).
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
calling all destroyers
Except they only profit off me if I use their free service, or e-mail someone who does.
Also, gmail or not, anyone who e-mails anything even remotely private is an idiot. Google reading e-mail is the least concerning part of any unencrypted e-mail. It always strikes me as really odd when people complain about what Google does to the equivalent of electronic postcards.
Right. The Post office archives all postcards for later access, any time, any place, ... for ever and ever. But then it goes one further - it opens my, I had assumed because I knew no better, 1st class mail (or any kind for that matter), and DOES THE SAME TO IT.
For ever is a long, long time. I think suckers sums it up nicely, though willing suckers would be more apt.
Yes, they can build a program to process the mails you are sending through their service and target you with ads...
If you have an issue with an automated process accessing your mail and taking actions based on the content of it, you'd better not use a spam filter either... Infact, you probably shouldnt use email at all unless you can find a mail server which isnt a program.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Ever turned on a new feature on a few hundred thousand servers?
Thought not.
I assume that it will take up to a week for them to roll it out to everyone.
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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
No, it "kinda seems" like they randomly distribute user profiles between (dozens/hundreds/thousands) of mail stores and mail access points, and the software of each system is being upgraded seperately.
Standard cleartext email, the kind of stuff that all email clients send by default, is basically a plain text file. There is no encapsulation or encryption at all. There is nothing preventing anyone and everyone along the way from reading it - much like a post card.
If you don't want anyone reading your email you can use any number of encryption tools to make it harder for unintended recipients to read it - but not impossible.
And if you're worried about Google retaining a copy of every email... Well, so can every single mail server that touches that message. As it gets relayed from one server to the next there is absolutely no guarantee that your message is not retained. There may very well be servers out there retaining copies for all of eternity...backing them up to tape...printing them out...
Quite simply, if you are concerned about security and/or privacy, email is the last way you want to communicate with anyone.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Will this allow push Gmail, yahoo style, on the iPhone?
I'm sure that no small part of it was designing a way to handle the protocol. Since Gmail does labels instead of folders and archives mail to remove it from the inbox, it definitely acts a bit differently from the way that we traditionally think of mail. Mapping those functions to IMAP functions was probably non-obvious.
Outlook IMAP support sucks ass. It works, but it's a kludge: they took the POP way of doing things and wrapped an IMAP protocol handler around it. Entourage and Thunderbird are quite good. Mail.app is so-so, but if you get any kind of lag on the connection things are unworkable: it tends to cache too aggressively which slows things down in the foreground when it should happen transparently in the background (there's no IDLE support either).
Yes please spam directly to my computer with a domain name assigned to it that will be a major pain in the ass to change.