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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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