Leave it to Google to make ancient software cool again. I switched from POP3 to IMAP back in 1997 while I was still going to school and working at U of I. I used it all the way up until I switched everything over to Gmail web-goodness. Most of that time, it seemed that almost nobody else cared or used IMAP, they were almost all using POP.
Now, suddenly, after Gmail introduces this feature it suddenly comes off as the newest and coolest thing around. Amazing. In my mind (and apparently a sentiment shared by others) it is long overdue. I actually wanted to switch the domain for one of my email addresses to Google Hosted a while back, and the lack of IMAP for use on my friend's cell phone was the reason we couldn't.
So, I now am so stuck on the gmail web experience that I really have no use for this feature, but since it was on one of my accounts, I decided to give it a whirl.
Overall, it looks like they have done a very good job with it. I think it appears to function well and I think all of the logistical questions that I have are now answered. Here are my thoughts.
The Good
- Labels show up as separate IMAP folders. Better still (and to answer one of my main questions), if you tag something with multiple labels it shows up in multiple folders under IMAP. Very nice.
- Inbox and folders are shown at the top level, and then hidden under a [Gmail] folder is essentially the folder list from the left-hand side of the web interface. Thus "all mail" and friends are available, but nicely hidden.
- Refer to #1. Now, try to go the other way. Dragging a message into a folder will automatically add that label to the message in gmail, copying to multiple will add all of them. Very slick.
The Bad
- Remember Gmail's fantastic idea that you never delete anything, you just archive it? Fantastic idea, I've raved like a lunatic about the value of data for a while now, and I use this as a shining example of how to do it right. Until you have to fetch all of those headers over IMAP... Outlook (my unfortunate choice of IMAP client) froze completely for about 10 minutes trying to pull this off. Most of that is Outlooks fault though. As long as you never fetch the headers for the "all mail" folder, this shouldn't be too terrible (maybe).
- This actually isn't anything against Google, it is against Microsoft. It turns out there wasn't as much bad as I expected, so this is filler. I setup the account in Outlook to use IMAP, and I happen to have a gmail address that is "something.somethingelse@gmail.com". Outlook politely warned me that my email address looked invalid, but then happily continued and worked perfectly. Morons. Reminds me of when BestBuy.com couldn't handle the hyphen in one of my email addresses. Read the email RFC's guys, this isn't hard.
So, good job Google. Your implementation of 1990's technology seems superb.
