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.

Comments

Re:Labels or Folders?

[Kadin2048]

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:IMAP WEEE!!!

[cs]

You write:

I always wondered why they chose POP over IMAP in the first place.

I'm only guessing, but think about the server resource usage. Everything they offer at present (web, pop) involves a client connecting, sucking briefly, and letting go. IMAP connections tend to be much longer lived, and that's a serious allocation issue with millions of users.

Re:Labels or Folders?

[the_wesman]

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:The more suckers the better !!

[Khaed]

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.

Re:Size of headers?

[cheater512]

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.