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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.
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?
I have the option on an account that is about 18 months old and another one that is about a month old. So, it doesn't seem to be related to when accounts were created.
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/
Ok I just tested it. In fact you *can* use this to upload emails!!! hooray! Now I can use gmail as my primary/only email repository!!!!!
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There's an option in the settings to pull email from up to 5 (?) sources on the GMail page. There are several settings that allow you to optionally move or copy the emails. I did the move option, so I could check if any mail didn't make it across.
On the whole it worked great, EXCEPT that the date of the mail got messed up, it took the entire day, and the order was a bit strange. I ended up having to sort by date sent rather than date received. It was also a big pain in the ass to get random mail from my old account throughout the day.
On the other hand, once it was finished, I had stored 5 years of emails from my school account. There's still a few emails that never made the transfer, and I'm not completely sure why yet.
You'll need Outlook. Any version will do I think, other email clients might work though in my experience Outlook Express doesn't work and neither does the Windows Live Mail client. Thunderbird should work though, but of course if you have a hotmail account or you use exchange, your only option will be to use Outlook. Basically with Outlook simply copy/move your folders (right click or drag) that you need from an existing imap/pop/mapi account whatever and put them into the google imap account. It should be that simple, of course it'll mean uploading the email you copy, so if you have a lot of it or are on a slow connection it will take time.
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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."
I work for Google, so I know for a fact that we have not "fired all employees that know anything about character encoding issues". We have an internationalization team which works with most customer facing Google products. I personally have tried this with foreign emails written in KOI8-R, UTF-8, GB2312, and ISO-8859-1 charsets. Please go to here to contact the gmail team with this issue, or you can reply to me directly with more details (specifically which character set and content transfer encoding were used in the mangled emails), and I will forward your issue to the right people.
Barraketh
FYI, I don't have an 'IMAP option'. But it still works...
Just configure your client to use imap.gmail.com as the server, with SSL enabled.
So it wouldn't be all bad then