Gmail IMAP - Not there yet
I was excited when Greg told me that Gmail had added IMAP support. I tried it out the other week and have since switched back to my old ways*. I had two main problems with it:
- I make extensive use of flagging in Mail.app and I use smart mailboxes that only show flagged items. When you flag something in a Gmail IMAP account, it flags it in 3 of the folders it creates: Inbox, Archive, and Starred. Because Mail.app treats each message in each folder uniquely, instead of seeing them as aliases of the same message, when I flag something it appears in my smart mailbox as 3 items. Lame.
- Your spam mailbox in Gmail gets treated as any old folder in Mail.app. Thus, my 5000+ unread spam emails appear as 5000 unread messages. I’m obsessive about getting my new mail icons down to 0, so it was a thorn in my side to see my spam treated this way.
With both of these issues, I could have “fixed” them in Mail.app if only it had better rules. I wish you could mark messages as read of apply rules to specific folders of an IMAP account or make combinations of AND and OR. Anyway, no Gmail IMAP for me yet.
*My “old way” is to have gmail forward all mail to a AOL free webmail account I setup for this purpose. They run IMAP as well. Then I have mail.app check the AOL mail, but use the Gmail SMTP for sending. Works pretty good. One note if you want to set this up yourself: it seems to me that AOL mail accounts you setup on their own only keep like 500 messages. But if you create an AIM account and then use it’s mail, there appears to be no restrictions. This is a theory I’ve formed based on my own experience, haven’t seen anything official about it.
I never noticed the triple flag thing before. That is totally lame. I have a flagged smart folder, but I never use it. Sure enough, all my GMail messages are tripled in there. None of my .mac or other accounts are, though.
I don’t seem to have the junk mail problem you do. Maybe you have your junk mail folder configured differently. In Mail.app Preferences > Junk Mail, I have “Move it to the Junk mailbox” radio selected. In Preferences > Accounts > my GMail account, under Mailbox Behaviors, I have “Store junk messages on the server” checked, and “Delete junk messages when: One week old” selected.
My junk mail folder does tell me how many unread junk mail messages there are, but it doesn’t incorporate them with my inbox count, since they are not in my inbox.
I do find that Mail.app can’t connect to my IMAP GMail account from time to time. I don’t have this problem with any of my other email accounts.
Comment by Mark — December 3, 2007 @ 11:37 am
The unread junk mail message count is what I’m talking about that bugs me. But yeah, it’s not part of my inbox.
Comment by Robert — December 6, 2007 @ 2:46 pm
I use smart mailboxes a lot too, usually to have one with all my unread and flagged messages in it, so I have the same problem.
I can’t actually test this yet because my mail.app is still chugging through hundreds of mails, but does setting the smart mailbox to only include messages from the “All Mail” mailbox work (or conversely not in any of the other mailboxes)? This way it should exclude the duplicate versions in other mailboxes/labels.
Comment by Andy Polaine — January 14, 2008 @ 3:15 pm
So the answer is, yes, that does work for sorting mail via smart mailboxes. The problem is that mail marked as read in the smart mailbox doesn’t get marked as read in the other mailboxes either.
Comment by Andy Polaine — January 14, 2008 @ 11:25 pm
[…] First thing I do is have my mail forward from gmail to an imap account on our dreamhost dev server. This is because I don’t like how gmail handles flagging. But essentially, I setup Mail.app to check my mail via imap. I leave my Inbox in threaded view and I use that for looking up old conversations. The crux of what I do differently is I have a smart folder named “To Do” that I am in most of the time and essentially my real inbox. Here are it’s settings: […]
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