Father of Initial Review of GMail's IMAP Service
I’ve been yearning for native IMAP for a long time now. Essentially since the day I got my iPhone. It got much worse as Leopard approached and the great features in Mail 3.0 were making me drool.
It wasn’t a simple decision though. I moved to GMail for really good reasons and I refuse to go back to running my own mail server. The result was to look at paid IMAP solutions but none of them offered the complete bevy of features I wanted. I finally identified both Fastmail and Tuffmail as having great services.
I was days away from switching to Tuffmail when GMail announced IMAP support. I eagerly awaited my account to be activated and started using it immediately. However, it’s a mixed bag unfortunately.
GMail has some concepts that make IMAP hard. Like labels versus folders. Like not really liking to delete email. Starred emails. They’ve accommodated that in the IMAP solution, but also complicated things in a bad way.
For example, GMail IMAP has to expose a folder called “All Mail” that is the catch all for email that doesn’t have any label. The unfortunate part of this is that mail clients will see two copies of everything, the one in a “folder” and the other one if the fake “All Mail” folder. This wreaks havoc with things like Smart Folders in Mail.
GMail also has some gnarly non-standard behavior. For example, when you send an email via it’s SMTP service it automatically puts a copy in your Sent Items “label”. This isn’t normal, and requires that you configure your Mail client in somewhat non-standard way.
On top of this, the service is a bit slow and has had some hiccups for me. I may still end up signing up for Tuffmail but I’ll give GMail IMAP a try since the price is right and the webmail client is so nice.
Hi
Just searched Google for “gmail imap review” and came up with this page first. I have had an almost identical experience to you, although I’d already gone with Tuffmail before GMail introduce IMAP.
I was so excited when they did that recently I signed up to Google apps and moved my MX records over to them.
But I have to say I’ve been disappointed for the same reasons – labels and folders just don’t mesh. SO now I’m in the same quandry, do I go with the good looking web client, or the better support for folders. For instance, I have a special folder called ‘Notifications’ that I redirect things like Facebook updates etc to. In Gmail that’s a label. So when that arrives, it appears in both All Mail and Notifications. But this is where the web client falls down, there’s no indication that there’s anything unread in a label! Also the labels are flat – so if you have something like Folder A/Folder B, what you get in GMail is two labels. “Folder A”, and “Folder A/Folder B”. Its not like GMail views them as related.
The other thing that’s much worse is the filter tool. In Tuffmail you had a LOT more options. In GMail it’s far more basic.
Have you had any more thoughts in the past couple of weeks?
Marcos
@Marcos,
Glad you found my site and nice to see that my PageRank helps in the Google search results. :-)
I’ve pretty much given up on GMail/IMAP for a couple of reasons. First, it seems to always have to update the “All Mail” folder which seems to take forever (at least in Mail.app). I’ve had some reliability issues and find that sometimes IMAP requests get “hung” and I have to kill that request to get the rest of them going again. I also don’t like that I have to configure my IMAP client in, what I would consider, is a non-standard way.
The privacy concerns in GMail are also starting to weigh on me, which is really pushing me elsewhere. It really unnerves me for example that you cannot delete a message via IMAP!
I’m planning to move to Tuffmail. I’m glad to hear that you found the filtering so much more powerful, that’s a huge plus and a weakness in GMail for sure. I’m curious how the spam filtering at Tuffmail compared to GMail? This is my biggest hesitation as I get over 100 spam messages a day.
On the bright side. Gmail’s support for IMAP will make it much easier to move to another mail service and migrate your mail. This was one of the problems that people had with moving to GMail before. It was a one-way door.
Well… now the labels tell you when there is new mail.
And in your filters. make sure you select
when a condition is met, apply the label AND archive the message.
When you do that, the message appears only on your label, and not on your inbox.
Gmail only introduced IMAP recently. Are any of you finding it any better now? Or is tuffmail better for IMAP?
@Rory,
I’m still not a fan, and have since moved to Tuffmail for email because it is a “normal” IMAP service and for other power-user features.
The GMail IMAP implementation is a bit wonky both in performance and features. For example, the mere existence of the “All Mail” folder makes many IMAP clients unhappy and makes search in an IMAP client completely annoying.