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.
Hmmm….I’m thinking now that the “Deleted Messages” label/folder is a mail.app thing. There is a local folder I hadn’t seen before on the Mac called “Deleted Messages” and it looks like creating that makes the Gmail label.
OK…”Deleted Messages” is a tag that’s used to temporarily flag something as in the trash (but not the same as the Google “Trash” label). When you do an IMAP expunge, that removes the label “Deleted Messages”. The message is still in “All Mail” and any other folder that you may have set up.