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GMail introduces IMAP

GMailOh, how long have I waited for this! Almost three years ago, I blogged about the then newly-introduced POP access for GMail (German) and, to summarize it for you, my conclusion was that POP does not sufficiently support GMail’s specialities, in particular the big storage capacity (downloading tons of mail is no fun) and tagging (which could easily be replicated in IMAP folders).

Now, three years later, GMail implements IMAP and with that, in my opinion, GMail has become a global player in email that now actually deserves the name.

IMAP features are mapped to GMail features reasonably, for example tags to folders as I suggested, or IMAP flags to GMail “stars”.

To test, I connected to my account with Thunderbird, and as far as I can tell now, it works nice and quickly. Good job, Google!

According to Jean Pierre, IMAP is not enabled for all users yet, but I assume everybody will get the feature soon. Once you do, make sure to check it out!



This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 9:45 am and is filed under Mozilla Crosspost, Tech Talk, websights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “GMail introduces IMAP”

  1. 1
    Laurens Holst Says:
    October 27th, 2007 at 10:33 am

    I think the option is available for everyone, but only if you have en-US selected as language it will show up in the options panel. Google does this pretty often, also the geotag functionality on Picasaweb is only available if you select US English. Pretty annoying, and I don’t see a good reason for it.

  2. 2
    Jean Pierre Says:
    October 27th, 2007 at 1:12 pm

    I do have en-US selected in GMail, but I’m still waiting for the Big G to provide me with IMAP ;)

  3. 3
    Fred Says:
    October 28th, 2007 at 12:51 am

    It’s true though that they do that quite often: In Google Calendar, the weather forecast can only be set up if you have it set to US English. It does allow international cities though, but the settings disappear when you change the language, while the forecast icons stay.

  4. 4
    $ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog » Apple Mail 3: Use GMail’s Trash Folder Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 2:18 am

    […] shiny new features including Mail (version 3). And you finally managed to integrate your GMail account using IMAP (woot!) into Mail. But what bothers you is the fact that when you delete mails, they still show up […]

  5. 5
    fredericiana » Blog Archive » Tweaking Mail.app and Thunderbird to Play Nice with GMail’s IMAP Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 3:12 am

    […] recently introduced IMAP feature of Google’s GMail seems to get increasingly more […]

  6. 6
    Michael C. Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 11:42 pm

    Hi,does anyone know how to sync messages that are already in your Archived folder on Gmail down to your Outlook via IMAP? Or can this only be done with POP?

  7. 7
    Jean Pierre Says:
    November 9th, 2007 at 12:55 am

    Michael,

    Those archived messages should automatically appear in the “All Mail” IMAP folder. But beware: it takes some time to download some hundreds megabytes of old mails ;-)

  8. 8
    Fred Says:
    November 9th, 2007 at 1:02 am

    Well, if you use IMAP, at least it does not download the entire mail but only their headers. This still takes a little while for a few thousand mails, but it’s considerably faster than downloading them all with POP.

  9. 9
    Jean Pierre Says:
    November 9th, 2007 at 1:26 am

    Fred:

    If you don’t set up your e-mail client to download e-mail headers, bodies and attachments as I did ;-)

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