Hans Across The Interwebs

Well I don’t actually use Outlook, but this might work for mail.app as well. The IMAP implementation of Gmail is very slow and constantly syncing different stuff due to the folders/tags discrepancy. It gets to pretty unusable sometimes.

Speed Up Gmail IMAP with Outlook [Microsoft Outlook Tip]: “By setting Outlook to download message headers only, retrieve new messages less frequently, and work offline, your Gmail in Outlook experience can be smoother and faster. What Gmail/IMAP/Outlook techniques are working for you? Let us know in the comments.”

The first thing I definitely recommend is not to sync up the local and gmail draft folders. When you write it’ll continually update your drafts folder and it’ll also somehow fill your gmail with parts of your drafts.

One setting I’ll try to to not store any attachments locally. It’s under the account settings. See if that’ll help.

(Via Lifehacker.)

IMAP, YouMAP, WeMAP: Mail Protocol’s Proponents Argue for Better Support: “Mark Crispin, IMAP’s outspoken creator, says Google’s implementation of his mail protocol is half-baked. Flawed as it is, others see IMAP as a necessary step forward as the wireless age increases our need for multi-device e-mail connectivity.

(Via Wired News.)

So I definitely recommend using the instructions from lifehacker to setup Gmail IMAP, but it’s still not working right for me. SLOW or not at all. The new leopard mail is a bit more informative about ‘downloading messages’ but it’s been going on for days now.

Gmail: A Better Way to Set Up Gmail IMAP: “# 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.”

As excited as I was about IMAP Gmail, it’s turned out to be a big disappointment so far. I’m sure it’ll be fixed at some point, but for now it’s nothing but crashes on mail.app (OSX). An email I was composing got sent out at least five times in varying states of composition and I don’t understand for the life of me why.

Besides that, it’s slow as molasses. My IMAP services as fastmail is much faster.

I only downloads my sent email from 2005 and 2006. Nothing recent here, yet it’s stopped updating.

For now I’d recommend not using IMAP Gmail until these kinks have been ironed out.

Well, for me anyways. I’ve even subscribed to other online services to get IMAP. But I always came back to Gmail. Because it’s just so freaking awesome. And now they have IMAP.

If you don’t know what IMAP is: it allows you to have an exact duplicate of you mailbox locally. Not just downloaded messages, but also their status. Read / Unread, which ‘folder’ they’re in. I’m just now downloading all the messages to my IMAP folder. Gmail doesn’t really have ‘folders’ though so I’d be very curious to find out how that’s going to work.

But nonetheless: IMAP!