Tweaking Mail.app and Thunderbird to Play Nice with GMail’s IMAP
The recently introduced IMAP feature of Google’s GMail seems to get increasingly more popular.
Still, in order to make popular email clients play well with GMail, they need some tweaking. Most notably, the default “Trash” folder assumed by most email clients will just create a GMail tag named [Imap]/Trash instead of actually putting the email into GMail’s trash folder.
Though, the good news is, help is near! Lifehacker has an excellent tutorial on tweaks you can apply to Thunderbird in order to solve this and other problems and make the most out of the Thunderbird+GMail combination.
For the passionate Mac users, Jean Pierre describes how to choose the GMail Trash folder in Apple Mail.
On a side note, choosing a special Trash folder is slightly complicated in Thunderbird (editing about:config is pretty advanced, I’d say). Unfortunately, this contradicts the recommendations on IMAP4 implementation (RFC 2683), section 3.4.8 (“Creating Special-Use Mailboxes”), where it says:
In addition, the client developer should provide a convenient way for the user to select the names for any special-use mailboxes, allowing the user to make these names the same in all clients used and to put them where the user wants them.
For “Sent”, “Drafts” and “Templates”, this is indeed already very conveniently handled in the account settings dialog, yet for the Trash we need to edit special preferences, which is slightly confusing.
Interestingly, there is already a bug on this (and has been for a while). The good news is: According to one of the comments, this is fixed in the trunk, so we can hope to get this feature with the next major release of Thunderbird. 
Depending on the reader’s eyes and screen, your hyperlinks are barely distinguishable from text.
Thunderbird needs to switch to IMAP by default for its gmail auto-setup, too.
It’d be _really_ nice if GMail didn’t feel like acting like a normal IMAP server was a big hack. The “Deleted Items” folder isn’t actually the same thing as Trash, for instance; “Trash”, to GMail, is just this special-cased tag which hides mail from the All Mail view. Not to mention the disconnect between folders and tags. I suppose that’s due to Google having not planned to make GMail a real IMAP service in the first place. Proprietary formats, pah.
– Chris
Dao: Thanks — I made the text a little darker and the links a little brighter. Guess I can’t expect people to have well-adjusted screens, can I
right
[...] There’s no point reproducing this information, I might as well link to the guy I found it off myself – here. [...]
[...] introduced IMAP access to their users’ mailboxes quite a while ago. Fred has written about using your GMail IMAP account with popular mail clients such as Apple’s Mail.app or Mozilla Thunderbird, I was giving my two cents on the GMail Trash [...]