2Paths Team Blog

Finally google have implemented IMAP for GMail. I set it up and it works quite nicely. Your ‘labels’, if you have any, are top level folders in IMAP and the google list of categories (All Mail, Drafts, Sent Mail, Spam, Starred, Trash) are all listed as folders within the [GMail] folder. Nice.

There are however a few things to note especially is using Thunderbird which has some interesting quirks when setting up IMAP accounts. Once you setup a new account (and before you login) its best to make the following changes to ensure smooth operation of your IMAP accoutn at gMail.

Server Settings

• Security Settings
  You need to ensure you use SSL (port 993) when setting up your account connection in Thunderbird (and any other mail client I guess) as thats the default for gmail IMAP. Thunderbird does not allow you to specify this during the wizard account creation (as far as I am aware) but you can access it from the Server settings panel in the account configuration dialog box.
• Server Settings
  Instead of storing deleted messages in the trach, its best to mark them as deleted this allowing gmail to manage the trash for you.

Copies and Folders

• Deleted items
  The nice thing about gmail is that if you send using googles SMTP server, your mail will automatically be saved in your gmail ‘Sent Mail’ category. As such its kind of redundant to get Thunderbird to also store the mail in the Sent Items (either locally or on gmail) so you may like to disable this.
• Drafts and Tempaltes
  Thunderbird by default stores Drafts and Templates (has anyone ever used these?) - to avoid these being created unnecessarily, you can select which folders to use or just set it to or store locally if you wish.

Once these things are setup you should be good to go. It is quite nice to have IMAP access to gmail as it means you can access your IMAPed gmail from other machines (and of course the web interface) and you have a consistent email experience. It seems to work much nicer than their POP access which was always a bit flakey - message status are nicely synchronized and centralised.

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