Gmail – Now with Free IMAP Support
Filed under: Analysis
For those of us who can’t get enough of our 2 GB no 3 GB no wait, now 4+ Gigs of free Ad-supported Gmail goodness, Google upped the ante on Wednesday by enabling FREE IMAP access (finally) for all accounts to the delight of many. A fair amount has already been covered on this topic (Gmail Blog, ArsTechnica, Engadget, 5ThirtyOne) (the web works fast), but I hope to offer some additional insight.
What’s the big deal?
A few months ago I started using Mail.app again as my primary email client. For the longest time I had stuck with the web based Gmail interface but for various reasons (spotlight search in the OS, Quicksilver integration, picking up a shiny new iPhone, etc.) I moved to using a client most of the time and accessing mail via POP. My setup was simple… access mail at home on my iMac, out and about on my iPhone, and when traveling on my Powerbook all via the native Mail.app application.
Of course POP presents a few challenges. Downloading your mail is just that, downloading only. If you read, reply, file, flag, delete or anything else you can do with your mail, you’ll have to do it all over again on each client.
This wasn’t terrible but there was a good bit of redundancy. Especially if I was on a long trip checking email on the road, I’d have the same set of email to process on my home computer when I returned. It was pretty quick to go through but if there were a few messages I wanted to save and address later, I had to be careful not to trash them.
Other Options
Prior to Wednesday’s announcement the only other major IMAP offering was via Apple’s .Mac service which for $100/year gives you 10 GB of online storage for documents, mail, and a website along with very nice integration with OS X. For me, I didn’t want to move away from Gmail so I just sat tight and kept my fingers crossed.
IMAP has been slow to come to free e-mail services for a variety of reasons. Because IMAP typically maintains connections between client and server, it requires more bandwidth and processing power to maintain per user. By enabling IMAP, Google is flexing its muscles.
While Yahoo and Hotmail have more or less caught up with Google when it comes to offering mass amounts of storage capacity, the addition of IMAP to Gmail will make a big difference in free e-mail services in the future.
It would once again seem that the usual suspects are needing to play catch up.
IMAP Setup
The basic setup is straightforward and Google has already provided the basic documentation. There are a few tips and tricks however so keep reading for a few suggestions.
Gmail
Follow Google’s quick instructions to enable IMAP support on your account. If you’re switching from POP, you may want to disable it as well at this point.
Housekeeping
Before enabling your clients for the first time it’s not a bad idea to login to Gmail and organize things a bit. For me, I had thousands of ‘unread’ messages in Gmail (because I had only accessed them via POP), and a slew of under-used labels that I no longer needed. By arranging this stuff up front, you will minimize the impact of syncing all your mail (20,000+ messages for me… mostly junk), making large changes, and then re-syncing again.
Things to consider:
- Mark all read mail as read.
- Archive all old mail out of your inbox (Thank you Merlin)
- Delete labels you no longer care about.
- Purge your Spam folder if it’s large and you’re confident you don’t need anything in there.
- Review old Filters to ensure they’re doing what you need them to do.
Mail.app
Creating a new account in Mail.app (or other clients) is also straightforward. Just follow Google’s step by step directions.
iPhone
Also, if you happen to have an iPhone you can go ahead and set it up by following Google’s directions as well. This gives the iPhone much tighter email integration. More on that in a moment.
Additional Configuration
There are a lot of great tips over at 5ThirtyOne to take the setup one step further.
Namely you need to configure your Drafts, Deleted, and Sent mail folders on your clients (Mail.app, iPhone, etc) to point to the proper folders on the IMAP server. If you do this right, a draft you start on your phone will be available to finish at home or on the web.
Properly sort Drafts, Deleted, and Sent mail on the iPhone
Open ‘Settings’ > ‘Mail’ > [Your Gmail IMAP account] > ‘Advanced’
Select ‘Drafts Mailbox’ > ‘On the Server’ > ‘[Gmail] Drafts’. Return to the ‘Advanced’ view.
Select ‘Sent Mailbox’ > ‘On the Server’ > ‘[Gmail] Sent Mail’. Return to the ‘Advanced’ view.
Select ‘Deleted Mailbox’ > ‘On the Server’ > ‘[Gmail] Trash’. Return to the ‘Advanced’ view.Properly sort Drafts, Deleted, and Sent mail in Apple Mail
Highlight ‘[Gmail] Sent Mail’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Sent’.
Highlight ‘[Gmail] Drafts’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Drafts’
Highlight ‘[Gmail] Trash’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Trash’
Highlight ‘[Gmail] Spam’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Junk’
Benefits and Tips
I imagine that’s enough to get everyone started. In addition to fully integrated email including your drafts, sent, folders, etc there are a number of interesting possibilities especially if you’re looking to enhance mail on your iPhone or other mobile device. I’ll fill in some other gaps soon.
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