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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.
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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?
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.
*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.
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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
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 :)
Yeah, the IMAP connection is secured via SSL.
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.
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?
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.
Use an MUA that doesn't suck? Even Outlook 2003 supports multiple IMAP accounts. Thunderbird has supported it since the Netscape Communicator 4 days. Actually I can't think of a client off the top of my head that supports IMAP and doesn't support multiple profiles.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Well. I have English (US) and no IMAP options. So it's probably not only that right now.
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.
US English shows up as POP/IMAP and has IMAP options. Russian shows up as POP and does not have IMAP options.
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
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!
You've got to wonder, is that a security measure or anti-competitive behaviour. "It's our user, only we get to read his email."
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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