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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 thought that only Apple would release an iMap? Had me fooled.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
Are they out of "beta" now?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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 personally hate "Labels", but how will Gmail support something basic like folders?
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
I read gmail via web at work, pop on my phone, pop & web at home. That means stupid effort to make sure that all the messages I've read are marked read everywhere, and that all the messages I haven't read get read without marking something read by habit. Worse - Gmail pop seems to have a tricky way of deciding what should or should not be downloaded. I've been hoping for GMail IMAP for ages, and praying for it ever since I got my e-mail friendly phone.
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 checked and had IMAP enabled, so I changed it on my iPhone too. My iPhone has folders for all my labels now too, and it you click on the folder it downloads the last 50 (or 25, based on your settings) of that label.
Previosly sent mail is in 'sent mail' folder under a 'Gmail' parent folder. Mail sent from the iPhone is in actual 'sent' folder. At least it's not emailing me a copy of my sent mail anymore.
My regular whatever@gmail.com doesn't show it, but the domain I host with google (the non-premium stuff) has it.
I wonder why it took Google so long to implement IMAP. Sometimes I wonder whether Google is becoming so huge and complex that issues as important as IMAP can take so long to implement. This is where Microsoft is at. Sadly.
I'll have to check to see if this is available for me, and if it is that would save some headaches. Currently I use XP and Ubuntu (on the same machine, fortunately) and I'm sharing Thunderbird's profile folder, but that causes lots of little issues. Add this to the list of reasons I've been using my Gmail account for longer than any other account.
*requires own domain
1) Create an e-mail account on your domain dedicated for this one purpose.
2) Forward your gmail account to above account.
3) Access above account via IMAP.
I hate POP3 as I routinely check my e-mail across multiple devices / computers daily. POP3 with server copy just doesn't cut it.
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.
_sig_ is away
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.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
This should be nice... IMAP would allow me to use real mail clients on both of my systems (which have two OSes each) without having to deal with lost messages or that "leave it on the server" mess.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
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
Or am I just a greedy bastard?
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Looks like my hosted gmail accounts (google domains) has the IMAP ability. No luck on my normal gmail account.
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 cs@cskk.id.au http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
this is really a random fraction, staged rollout. Just wait and you'll have it too in due time :)
Imap can replace web access well enough (e.g. for laptop on the road). But I download multiple gmail accounts from my desktop computer via pop. I don't see how imap could work with multiple accounts. Any ideas?
Be heard || Be herd
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).
This is where your clients stay connected, and the server notifies the mail client when there is mail waiting, rather than having the client repeatedly polling the server.
If/when they get this working it will be fantastic for those of us with mobile devices who can't afford a high end data plan.
PS - if you have a Gmail account, and you can't see the IMAP option in settings, log completely out of gmail, close the browser window, and then connect and check again - that's all it took for me to find this nice new feature ;-)
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?
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
it does.
Just to test a theory, I created another account on Gmail, and it had IMAP right from the get to.
while $random_provider may have been offering it for some time, this is something different.
it doesn't really require much skill to install cyrus or uw imapd and start charging 100$/year for that. i would be surprised if noone did it.
but implementing it for free and on google scale is way, way more than that and needs planning and thought.
first version of gmail was in development for quite some time before it was released in 2004.
I've been wondering for a while if they'd roll out IMAP, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the supported SSL for IMAP. For them I'm certain the overhead is marginal, it's still a nice mail service.....if you don't mind the google indexing your mail.
The POP3 RFC: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1939.txt is 23 pages. The IMAP RFC is 108 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3501.txt
Why do you think?
What makes you think that there are ads in their IMAP mail? From my testing just now, there are no ads (just as there are none using their POP3 service).
It does appear that their IMAP service works much better than their POP3 server. With POP3 (using the protocol directly), retrieving messages using message numbers in order seems to retrieve messages from random time periods, unrelated to anything I can fathom (including "conversations", etc.) It also seems to have something to do with when and how messages have been previously read via POP3. This isn't noticed by most POP3 clients, because they download all of the messages first and then sort by date. But some have a problem with it. Their IMAP server appears to actually honor the policy of having the numbers match the reception time.
I've been running my own mail server for the last seven years just so that I could have IMAP access.
:-D
In the last year or two my anti-spam measures have become less and less effective and because I'm no longer a sysadmin at an isp I just haven't bothered keeping up with newer/better ways of spam filtering.
And then there's that Cyrus IMAP sucks balls, and just try to keep it working with qmail-ldap after you've done a dist-upgrade. And then give up on qmail-ldap and lose the ability to use dash-extensions. Bummer.
Methinks that I'll be switching to gmail to handle email for my domains and turning off my IMAP daemon. I'll just run an IMAP client there to have my own backup archive. I'll keep my own SMTP daemon running so that I can get back the dash-ext functionality.
And then I'll point squirrelmail at gmail so that I can keep using my own web-based front-end from places that block web-based email.
This rocks.
Well, I have been amazed that a company that has snapped up more genius talent than any other on the planet the past few years could not get its head around IMAP. I mean....WOW!
Its been my biggest complaint about Gmail. I think I wrote in a suggestion 5 minutes after I got my first Gmail account when it was limited to those invitees for "BETA" (which it still says BETA what's with that crazy silly marketing BS anyway....is someone in love with the word BETA over there?)
Unfortunately, my account does not have IMAP option, go figure.....
Real men don't need signitures!!!
You have to switch your language to "English (US)" to get the IMAP options in your GMail settings.
Other interface languages will get the update and therefore the translation sync later, as usual.
My favourite operating system is ReactOS; binary compatible to WinNT series
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.
I just bought a subscription to dot-mac last week because I got tired of being stuck with POP with my Gmail account.
The one I forward all my mail from - IMAP enabled.
The one I forward all my mail to - no IMAP.
Oh well.
Was one of the first to get a invite from blogger, nothing so far, seems to be random at best
its great to see IMAP support, now i can use what ever client i want from anywhere
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
Well. I have English (US) and no IMAP options. So it's probably not only that right now.
I think Google has rolled this out in a hurry. This currently says Check 'Require logon using Secure Password Authentication (SPA).' but the screenshot shows the SPA box unchecked. It also omits mention of the need to "Use same settings as my incoming mail server" in the Outgoing Server tab. Of course, this will not stymie the average /. reader, but still...
Why such a hurry? Maybe this is a result of competition from Microsoft's new Live Mail (or whatever) which, after I went through a tedious upgrade process, actually seemed to have some very cool integration *and* 5GB of storage. And Yahoo's Go client for mobiles is very slick and way, way ahead of any Google's equivalent available offerings except, of course, the client-native Maps.
Da Blog
I've got my own domain via IMAP and I'll see how well this works in conjunction.
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.
I know Google is not evil and all, but they are a for-profit corporation. How will they monetize the email experience if everyone is reading email via desktop client? Will they continue to subsidize the email service from search revenues?
Instead of deleting email, is there a way to archive messages through IMAP?
US English shows up as POP/IMAP and has IMAP options. Russian shows up as POP and does not have IMAP options.
Anyone tried this with kmail? It's been really slow for me, and seemingly at random it'll just finish up with a partial listing of my gmail inbox. I haven't used kmail in something like a year though, so I'm not really sure if this might just be some normal bugginess. Last year I never had any problems with imap on it though, with a pretty heavy amount of email traffic.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I signed up for Google Apps for Domains after reading this. The first account I created does not have IMAP as an option, but the subsequent sub-accounts I created do. I suppose I could delete the first account and make another account with the same name, but for some reason they make you wait 5 days before you can re-create one.
I'll try again in a few days.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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.
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
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.
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!
IMAP is a horrible protocol. Works brilliantly but its a absolute nightmare to implement.
Its Google. A million connections is nothing. :P
actually, I've forced gmail to create folder. usually most people will only label the email, of course when you open your inbox, it will be so messy with a lot of "unfiltered" email. to create a folder like is easy, first I create a filter to the email, which email is going to be filtered and moved to the folder, second I label it, third I archive it. So it won't be seen on the main Inbox page. To see the content, just click the label on your left screen. Just as a folder, without messing up your main inbox.
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Alright, this is from memory, so it may be incorrect, but hopefully the gist is right... When I opened my gmail account in February, I specified that I was in the UK. I was very disappointed that I couldn't do certain things that were promised, such as POP download. However, when I changed my country to USA, the settings that allowed POP were there! All I can suggest is that, maybe, changing your country of origin may help in the short-term until Google sort this out?
My web domain.
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.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Fully. Thanks Google!
I seem to have the IMAP option in mine, woot!
Same as parent: I have been logged in for days, no IMAP. Logged out, logged back in, IMAP!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Microsoft's trying for #38?
I'm using Camino, and didn't get the IMAP option until I told it not to check my browser.
http://mail.google.com/mail?nocheckbrowser
I only got a handful of messages from a year ago.
Why would google do this? In my experience as a webhoster, IMAP is heavier than POP. And even POP, why would they do that? Beceause now they're offering really free mail, where with webmail you have ads.
blaat
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Still, Gmail's web user interface is better than any local email client.
factor 966971: 966971
I haven't seen this mentioned and thought it might be useful to someone. If you need to get to your mail from multiple machines, you can use Gmail (or another email provider), POP, Mutt and Gnu Screen on your home computer. Then you can ssh into the computer and do whatever you need to do. Your mail is "synchronized" because you are only changing the local mailboxes.
IMAP is a horrible protocol. Works brilliantly but its a absolute nightmare to implement.
I've been testing IMAP servers since 1996. It's way easier to test than the !!?$%@! webmail client of the month.
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
My main gmail account does not have the option, but my professional/personal one does. How are they deciding this?
Thunderbird can access Hotmail and other webmail accounts with the Webmail extension. I'm using it to access my Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. Likewise, Exchange is usually configured to support POP and/or IMAP, meaning any decent mail client can pull emails from it. See http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Connecting_POP_And_IMAP_Clients_To_MS_Exchange_Server.html for details. That won't give you access to all the other features, but it will let you get to your mailbox.
However, I'd think that load balancing those connections would have been the primary issue. Keeping a stateful IMAP connection open across a given cluster of servers can be tricky, versus a straight "wham, bam, thank you ma'am" POP login.
This would generally be a problem only for mere mortals, but Google is, well... Google. So I'm not surprised to see them offering it, even if it is a little late in coming.
I had nothing but problems with Outlook IMAP at the company I work for: you'd think it'd be as seamless as using an Exchange account. I put as many as I can on Thunderbird: works well for such use.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
Exactly. You'd probably be better off setting up and HTTP server and having the people you want to communicate with post a message directly to you over SSL. Couldn't ISPs just give everyone a domain name (probably a long one), so that instead of email, with messages bouncing all over the place, you just post directly to someones computer. It's not like anybody remembers emails addresses anyway, just store them in an address book.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
IMAP access fixes the issue of easily finding emails with big attachments, just sort by size in your favorite IMAP client.
By default Seamonkey for example has "Maximum number of server connections to cache" (Server Settings -> Advanced...) for IMAP accounts set to 5, but this causes to create a new session (authentication etc) when you move between (first five) folders, set it to 1 and and it uses single connection.
And also a nice feature is that you can view your quota from the IMAP client.
The interface won't know that the new tag is a specialization of the the old tag, the way it knows a subfolder is a specialization of a folder.
With my old folder based email client I had a hierarchical view of the folders, and could open and close branches. I could also apply operations on a whole branch. I can do no such thing with tags as implemented in gmail, and as a result I have far fewer tags than I used to have folders.
I can easily imagine ways to extend tags so they would be as powerful as a folder hierarchy, for example by allowing you to tag tags. But they are not in gmail.
"Are they out of "beta" now?" We're releasing on time. Think of all the things we learned This was a triumph for the people who are still alive. /outOforder/
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
isnt' that the best part of imap? does anyone think Google will support that?
www.itjerk.com
IMAP is great (my account still does not show it though).
Now the only thing still missing is advanced filtering capabilities, something like Sieve.
Some mailing lists I'm on only identify themselves by custom headers.
Fine-tuning the spam filtering would be nice too.
Once they implement it, I don't see any reason not to switch.
It finally all came through, in dribs and drabs, filling in from both ends towards the middle.
I'm thrilled that they're finally adding IMAP support. I'll finally be able to synchronize both ways with my Blackberry instead of the convoluted method I use now involving forwarding to a BIS account after applying message filters (meaning I see each message twice, once on the Blackberry and then again in the web browser, even if I deleted it on the BB).
I don't have it on either of my accounts yet (GMail or GMail for Domains), hopefully it gets added soon. I know the "for Domains" accounts tend to get features much later than the "regular" GMail, but judging by the comments already in this thread, it sounds like some Domains people have already gotten the IMAP option.
I guess they're counting on people still using the web interface most of the time to see the ads? If you use IMAP as your only means of accessing the account, how do they recover any costs?
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.
Obviously :rollseyes:
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. We email private stuff all the time - all 4096-bit PKI encrypted of course.
What, google doesn't offer secure encryption? All these moves by google, IMO, are fluff made to get the masses to go "wow, that's cool!". Until Google provides a service that rescinds some of their control in favor of the end-user, it's a toy.
Website Hosting
I wonder if that is true though.
The thing is I am very protective of my gmail account and never use it to sign up to any websites that are at all dubious. Doing so I have managed to avoid getting any spam whatsoever. I realise that the mail servers can access my message, but I would guess that it is hard for someone with malicious intentions to set up their own mail server and have people use it. If true then email seems fairly safe after all.
Their help system seems to indicate a full-scale deployment. Eventually.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77695&topic=12763
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
- The sender's machine
- The sender's SMTP server, often run by their ISP.
- The receiver's MX host.
And that's it. Sometimes there are more servers on the receiver's end when the MX host is in a pool of servers and mail gets handed off to other servers for storage. If you have an address in there that is forwarded to another address, you'll get another host or two. If the sender uses webmail, there will usually be an entry for the webmail server connecting to an SMTP host in the same domain. Mailing lists add another hop or two.Now, I'm not saying email sent 'in the clear' is secure -- far from it. But it's not true as many people say that email bounces through 'so many servers' -- the common case is 2 servers, and the next most common case is 3 or 4. Even in cases where a mail might bounce through several servers, rarely will mail be handled by machines outside 2 domains (3 in the case of forwarders and mailing lists).
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
The GMail Team has finally officially commented on the addition of IMAP to GMail on the public About GMail "What's New" page.
Also, the Official Gmail Blog has more information on the Gmail IMAP implementation and how it works across devices.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
This should make it easier for the gmail filesystem!
I used to be very protective of my email the same way. However no matter how hard I tried one of my relatives, or business relationships would be careless with my address and it would inevitably end up on many spammers lists. I tried several anti spam tools but I couldn't get any that were satisfactory to me. It was getting so bad I was ready toss my email and get a new one. Which would have been a real shame, as my email is myFirstname@Mylastname.com. Anyway I signed up for gmail's my domain deal. Since then my account has been spam free. Well the inbox is spam free the spam folder usually has about 3000 spams(they are auto deleted after 30 days.) Now I don't care. Out of habit I'm still somewhat cautious But I don't really have to be.
TODO create witty sig.
Very cool.
Now just to sound like an annoying ingrate, here's my remaining list:
* LDAP-access to the contacts
* mobile sync for calendar
* mobile sync for contacts, notes, etc.
sudo ergo sum
I'm glad they finally added IMAP support... but, unfortunately, neither my generic gmail account, nor my 'google apps for your domain' gmail are giving me the IMAP option. I wonder how long before it becomes aavailable to all gmail users.
I don't know if this has anything to do with it my Gmail account is no longer working with POP on thunderbird (both Linux at home and Windows at work). I don't have IMAP available yet on my Gmail account.
Hi,
Let me introduce you to a friend of mine called S/MIME:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME
Encrypted and/or signed email (GPG is also acceptable if you/your clients aren't in the PKI world). All mail clients support this. You'll thank me later.
I use gmail for several chatty mailing lists. This works fine from within the webmail interface, because I just apply the label & skip inbox.. and each mailing list then has its own "folder".
But, for POP clients, this is a pain because they just download ALL new messages, regardless of any classification.
This is especially poor on a limited device with a slow connection, like a smartphone. In that case, I only want to download what is in my Inbox, and not things that have been shuffled off to various folders.
Will IMAP allow for this?
I realize that the Google Apps SAML based distributed authentication stuff will not work for Gmail POP. I'm just curious if anyone knows if Google plans on making this work with IMAP. That would be a killer feature for Google Apps on the education side of things...
I have two Gmail accounts, both have IMAP.
I also have two Google-hosted domains, and neither domain has it. (Darn! I use the domain email addresses more than the gmail.com addresses!)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
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The problem you're glossing over: since the message is sent in clear text, the machines who have access to the message contents is not limited to SMTP servers.
Just about any device in between can parse/save/archive the content (sender/destination ISP routers, your ISPs ISP, etc...)
I want to be able to check my mail form my laptop and my desktop, but when one downloads messages via POP, the other can't. Gmail has the option "Enable POP for all mail", but that seems to revert to all mail since now when I check my email.
Unfortunately, I don't have the option to enable IMAP in Gmail. Will it become available to everyone?
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.
As long as the ads get what she looks like right and that she must obey all my commands, I'm fine with it.
Excuse my lack of experience in this area (Last time I ran a mail server was over a decade ago and was all POP3/SMTP, but can someone clue me on what IMAP offers that POP3 does not?
Sounds like it must be better, but I haven't the slightest idea what.
Just to add to that. I missed a few steps.
Set the following option under "server settings"/"security settings"
Use secure connection: SSL
You'll also want to add the smtp server:
Server Name: smtp.gmail.com
Port: 587
Username and Password: yourusername@gmail.com
Use secure connection: TLS
A hosted MAPI / Exchange account is much much better than IMAP.
Granted, you pay $7 per month for it, but it syncs your calendar, tasks, contacts, email and notes all in one shot across PC, laptop and mobile.
traceroute to gsmtp163.google.com (64.233.163.27), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 123.123.123.254 (123.123.123.254) 0.303 ms 0.387 ms 0.500 ms
2 123.123.123.123 (123.10.123.123) 2.847 ms 3.072 ms 3.299 ms
3 router.mydomain.com (XXXXXXXXX) 4.585 ms 5.770 ms 6.992 ms
4 inet-mex-vallejo-16-s4-1-5-0.uninet-ide.com.mx (201.147.96.202) 53.506 ms 53.099 ms 46.419 ms
5 * bb-mex-nextengo-25-ge14-0.uninet.net.mx (201.125.73.6) 52.929 ms 46.308 ms
6 bbint-la-onewilshire-2-pos-6-0.uninet.net.mx (200.38.192.229) 118.067 ms 76.165 ms 123.244 ms
7 72.14.197.233 (72.14.197.233) 166.825 ms 166.244 ms 152.814 ms
8 209.85.253.178 (209.85.253.178) 169.899 ms 161.260 ms 160.767 ms
9 209.85.251.32 (209.85.251.32) 165.965 ms 165.478 ms 152.600 ms
10 72.14.236.8 (72.14.236.8) 164.518 ms 163.878 ms 145.808 ms
11 64.233.174.81 (64.233.174.81) 167.846 ms 167.146 ms 153.377 ms
12 66.249.95.244 (66.249.95.244) 168.927 ms 164.328 ms 158.256 ms
13 66.249.94.127 (66.249.94.127) 150.111 ms 157.948 ms 150.717 ms
14 72.14.236.194 (72.14.236.194) 157.136 ms 194.446 ms 193.781 ms
15 gsmtp163.google.com (64.233.163.27) 193.311 ms 192.808 ms 159.062 ms
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
I've got the setting but after turning it on I am unable to connect to the server. SO... it appears you have to wait a bit to get it going. I don't remember having the same issues when they added POP.
Mighty nice of you. Does your policy include family and close friends? (kidding)
Look, I agree that sending out random Plaxo spams to anyone you meet is more than a little rude. However, there are lots of features of the service that are very useful. I have a lot of contacts who use Plaxo and their information is automatically updated without me having to do any data entry (or spam them) which saves me a LOT of time. Plaxo also keeps keeps my address book available from anywhere in the world, synchronizes said address book with Thunderbird, Outlook, LinkedIn (if you use it), Yahoo mail, and several others. Plus it acts as an off site backup in case my address book gets wiped out by accident, say by a computer crash, or if I just need to port my address book to a new computer. The service isn't perfect by any means, (no exporting contact to Gmail, some of the newer features are still getting the bugs worked out, and some other issues I could mention) but it's useful to me without being a problem for others. Your mileage may vary.
Yes! Tested with FlexMail 2007 on Windows Mobile 6. Not as fast as push-email, but it works!
I use GPG to encrypt any e-mail that I don't want read by anyone other than the recipient. I don't know what the problem is. I don't blame the mailbox provider for shortcomings with encryption. That's up to us end-users, in my opinion.
Sure, but most people wouldn't call a big-iron Cisco (for example) router a "server". I'm not saying passing around clear-text email is a good idea if you're sending anything private, just saying that "it goes through lots of servers" isn't really the case.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
The problem (annoyance really) with this is twofold:
1. Your Labels list on the left hand side of Gmail becomes bigger than necessary. I want to see Clients and Friends on the quickpick list there, but I don't want to see Joe, Mark, and Betty.
2. You cannot "drill down" through your labels as you can with folders, because there is no hierarchy.
-Tommy
P.S. I use my labels as the parent described, and keep my inbox empty of all items unless they require attention. I just wish they had a heirarchy.
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This new IMAP feature doesn't seem to work with Google Apps accounts... http://www.google.com/a/
I had been using IMAP on my account and about 1710 eastern time, the option disappeared and my client started telling me Your IMAP server wishes to alert you to the following: IMAP is not available for your account. (Failure). Are they already backing off? I was really enjoying it.
The IMAP servers are good but the protocol is horrible.
By Jove, you're right! And I was going to migrate that stuff to my new domain next week! Oh well.
> ... IMAP doesn't map well to gmail's style of doing things already ... Do you know if Google has any plans to develop a newer protocol ...
>
I was hoping that when Gmail offers IMAP access they would implement "labels" through IMAP flags, and was very disappointed to see how they implemented it as "folders" (called "mailboxes" in the IMAP4 specification, and for a good reason). Messages with more than one label applied are just broken into multiple copies, and any attempt to use multiple labels to create some structure in the online email store or subfolders to create structure on the local store is flattened on the other side. As I recall there were several discussions of implementation of label/keywords/somthing of the sort in FastMail.FM forums, and a major reason that was mentioned (I guess by Rob) is that those IMAP clients that do have such a mechanism don't implement it in a consistent way (with each other), so it's quite impossible to implement a "labels" feature that would work with more than one major client.
If Gmail had chosen to implement labels so it would work with just one or a few mail client, it would have pushed the standardization of this forward. The way Gmail has done it would not work smoothly for people who regularly apply multiple labels.
IMAP4 is quite an old standard, and I think we in need of an "IMAP5" that would be more appropriate for people that use IMAP mailboxes as subfolders of a folder they consider as their "mailbox", and also want to be able to apply multiple labels and to search mail in multiple folders, things the present IMAP specification just doesn't have.
Definitely - and the problem is that there really are only two protocols, POP3 and IMAP4, in anything like wide use.
Hotmail/Microsoft had a chance to do something great with their Outlook protocol, but being Microsoft they were more concerned with keeping it proprietary than with making it useful to the world at large by freeing it.
There are enough things out there now (Gmail and Opera's client being the ones I know best) looking at a less folder-centric view of the world that it would be good to have a way to share that view between systems. At the moment everything just tries to shoehorn things that don't really fit onto IMAP and you get the same information loss that you get with POP3 fetching and webmail talking to it when you're not at home - duplication of effort and loss of flagging.
I haven't talked much publically about my eventual design goals for my own mail server (I've been wanting to write one for a long time!) but one of the main things is an "embedded mode", where there's a replica of your mailbox running locally on your own computer, talking a much richer protocol back to the mail server, and talking IMAP or POP3 or protocol de jure to your client program. Sure it takes more space this way, but it would be such a fast experience for users, with reliable offline mode and backups.
Also, a larger embedded mode where an organisation could install a local mail server but still have it fully replicated to a larger ISP or mail provider company who provided incoming MX, outbound queuing, spam and antivirus, etc - but without the user seeing the lag times to connect to a machine potentially on the other side of the world, and not making the mailstore useless when the network link to the world was down.
But I ramble... I haven't actually implemented much of this yet, and plenty is still in the "ideas bouncing around my head" stage.
Bow-ties are cool.
err, yeah, I meant to say if you e-mail private things unencrypted, but managed to fail at /. and not say that
Again, the archival thing is something Google talks about very openly. Everyone who uses Gmail knows about it. And again, they only archive the data sent to/from their users.
I don't see what you object to if you know better than to send stuff you wouldn't want archived through gmail. If it's private, or if you don't want it sticking around: Don't fucking blog it, don't e-mail it, don't write it down, and don't put it on your damn myspace.