Daily Archives: November 4, 2007

Google IMAP

So, Google now supports IMAP for Gmail! Fantastic! I’m testing it right now with mail.app on my Mac running Leopard (I’ll do a blog post on Leopard later). It seems to work well. Because of the nature of Gmail, it does some things differently. Here’s a chart that describes common IMAP actions and what happens in Gmail. There is one thing that it does that doesn’t seem to be described in the Gmail documentation. It’s not a problem, just undocumented. When you delete a message from the IMAP Inbox, it removes it from the Gmail inbox, which you expect…it leaves it in any other labels where the message may appear. However, it also creates a new Gmail label “deleted messages” and puts the message there, as well. It’s not really deleted (in the Gmail trash), apparently just flagged.

I’ll keep on using it a bit. I’ve gotten really used to the Gmail web interface, however. The one thing that this does, though, is reenable use of X.509 certificates for digital signatures/encryption, as that’s handled in the client.