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Free IMAP On Gmail

Posted by kdawson on from the bout-time dept.

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.

7 of 440 comments (clear)

  1. Size of headers? by Psychor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not sure exactly how they're going to implement this, since I can't see the option in my account as yet. I would imagine they'd have to limit it somehow though, since for accounts with thousands and thousands of emails sitting around in them like mine, the size of even downloading the headers via IMAP would be fairly prohibitive?

    I would guess they'll limit support to a few hundred of the latest mails only or something like that, but if anyone has checked it out and has any information that'd be useful.

  2. Labels or Folders? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I personally hate "Labels", but how will Gmail support something basic like folders?

    1. Re:Labels or Folders? by RuBLed · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Isn't that the same? And you could tag a single mail with multiple labels, which is essentially like making a shortcut on every folder/label? I use very basic labels but yes I agree, labels should have an option to have a folder like interface.

  3. Re:Can you use it to upload mails? by Carthag · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Care to give a bit more details on how you do this? I wouldn't want to accidentally delete all my mails and have to look through backups.

  4. Re:Can you use it to upload mails? by gnuman99 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm sure Google is very happy about it too. Targeted advertising people, targeted advertising.

    So maybe good for NSA and other 3 letter agencies - they don't even have to try to intercept email these days anymore. People store it conveniently for them on Google.

    gmail, hotmail, instant messanger, facebook, myspace, slashdot, etc. The distributed Internet has become very modular these days. People are worried about root DNS hosts. Imagine what people would do if you took down only a handful of these domains. 1/2 the people online would be lost.

  5. Leopard by sam.thorogood · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This co-incides slightly with Mac OS X Leopard, in that, the instructional video talked about "how easy it was to automatically use GMail accounts in Mail. Well, I think support by Google may have been pivotal.

  6. Warning: Gmail IMAP support is ASCII only!!! by bertilow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just tried the new shiny IMAP support in Gmail. All my messages seemed to download quickly and easily, and all seemed well. But a closer look revealed the horrible truth: All non-ASCII characters in all messages (received or sent) have turned into question marks (two or more for each character). So beware!

    It seems that Google have fired all employees that know anything about character encoding issues. Google used to do such things very well, but that is falling apart in a very ugly way. Google Groups was the major example, but now Gmail IMAP has probably taken its place as the major Google character encoding debacle. If it weren't for the fact that the Google Groups character encoding bugs (major bugs!) have remained unsolved (with no reaction whatsoever from the programmers) for a very long time now, I would have supposed that these IMAP bugs will quickly be solved. But I'm not very optimistic, actually.