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For me, it's not that I'm afraid of GMail removing IMAP, it's that Gmail IMAP works really, really bad. For an email-client to work well with Gmail, it has to b
by maaaats 13y ago
For me, it's not that I'm afraid of GMail removing IMAP, it's that Gmail IMAP works really, really bad. For an email-client to work well with Gmail, it has to be tailored to Gmail, and that has given me some issues lately.
For instance, most of my mail is sorted into labels, skipping the inbox. When using a mail client with IMAP, these labels shows as folders. Deleting the mail from my client, doesn't delete it from Gmail, only removes the label. Useless.
- masnick 13y agoI agree that IMAP will probably stick around in some form. My big concern is if they start doing some kind of rate limiting, it could make it very difficult to get all your email out. However, along these lines the removal of Jabber support from Gmail is a little bit scary (first they removed federation support, then they killed it altogether). Limiting or removing IMAP is not outside the realm of possibilities.
- jmillikin 13y ago> However, along these lines the removal of Jabber support > from Gmail is a little bit scary (first they removed > federation support, then they killed it altogether) Federation support was temporarily disabled, then re-enabled once they got spam filtering in place. Currently, XMPP works perfectly with a Gmail account.
- masnick 13y agoI wasn't aware of that. I actually ran into federation issues a few months ago, but maybe it has been fixed since then. My understanding is that upgrading to Hangouts still disables the old XMPP support.
- jmillikin 13y ago> My understanding is that upgrading to Hangouts still > disables the old XMPP support. Sort of; the web interface will connect to either Hangouts or XMPP, but not both at once. XMPP continues to work fine for non-web clients, such as Pidgin.
- gohrt 13y agoWhat happens if you delete from the All Mail folder?
- mhurron 13y agoWait, IMAP sucks because you do something in a non-standard way (labels in GMail) that is exposed over IMAP in the best way it can fake (folder) and it is IMAP's problem that automagically do what you think it should? And just for added measure, deleting the label seems to me to be the right thing to do.
- gcr 13y agoOP's point was that one of IMAP's weakenesses is that it provides no clean way to represent what gmail does.
- saurik 13y agoThis is incorrect: Gmail could (and really should) be represented as a single mailbox, with labels mapping to flags. Combined with support for the (widely implemented in non-Gmail servers) QRESYNC extension to make resynchronization of the flags efficient, this would be a great mapping of Gmail's semantics to IMAP. However, most IMAP clients expose mailboxes as "folders" and barely support flags at all (no indexing, not even slow search, no UI at all most of the time, and if it even bothers to parse them, often has some silly limit like "five flags that must be configured ahead-of-time in Settings"), so users would have had a totally useless experience. In essence, Gmail's IMAP is implemented the way it is not because it is the best way to map Gmail's semantics on to IMAP, but because it provides a reasonable fit to the way Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail (the only e-mail clients that have any marketshare) represent IMAP. Those clients represent trees of mailboxes as a folder hierarchy. While commonly believed, people really need to stop blaming IMAP for Gmail: it's about as silly as claiming using HTTP headers as part of an API specification is impossible because none of IE, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, allow users to modify the headers in their document-oriented web browsers.
- maaaats 13y agoActually I meant that it's one of Gmail weaknesses that I need a gmail-specific client to use it properly.
- maaaats 13y agoNo, I'm not blaming IMAP, I'm blaming Gmail for making it hard for me to use my email with a standard mail-client.