October 24, 2007
Gmail now has IMAP, for those of you interested in using mail applications on your computer instead of using the web interface. Huzzah!
Oh, hell yeah.
In short: POP offers two actions, "receive" and "delete/archive". If you always read mail from home, you can pull new mail off the server and read it locally. If you have a mobile device you can put duplicate copies of all your mail on the device.
However, deleting the local/mobile copy doesn't reflect back to the server copy, and there's no concept of 'mailboxes' or 'labels' or other such last-century concepts, and it's easy to end up with multiple/missing copies of messages if you do something funny....
IMAP fixes all this.
Unfortunately, GMail does not yet act as an IMAP /client/ -- which means that transitioning from your @gmail.com to your @thatswhereimaviking.com address with folders and tags intact is (while still possible) not yet trivial.
Actually, I think you can, by syncing a local IMAP client with first one and then the other account. I will attempt this daring feat and report back with careful instructions.
Hmmm... actually, no IMAP for Google Apps users yet. Sorry, thatswhereimaviking.com clients.
If for some reason you are constrained by even Gmail's generous 4359 MB capacity (I'm looking at you, biggun), this also makes local maintenance a snap: you can sort on size or arrival order and other things the gmail web interface won't otherwise allow.
To free up space, sort by size, snipe the top few, and Zipf's Law says you'll have a ton more room.
IMAP is working on my google apps account. hooray!
Cool, mine too. A couple resources: gXFER -- Case studies for GMail migration.
I've used the gXFER tool to move my filters and contacts over; later this weekend I'll try the IMAP to IMAP trick.
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More IMAP info from Google that I didn't find earlier, including what your mail program actions do in Gmail.
posted by doncarlo at 09:31AM CST on October 24