Just in time for Leopard. I’d been wanting to switch back to using Apple Mail because of all the coolness that’s been promised in the new version, but managing Gmail through mail.app is like a low paying part-time job. Once you read everything in mail.app, it still comes up as unread in Gmail’s web interface. Well no more. By using the IMAP protocol rather than POP, your local collection of email stays in sync with the web version. Which makes reviewing old emails and composing offline possible while staying in sync with the server.
Basically, it’s gonna make things much smoother. And here’s an unannounced bonus to Gmail with IMAP…
Goodbye GMail Loader!
For some time, folks have been cooking up ways to get their entire email archive into the Gmail web interface. Why? I don’t know, maybe for archive purposes? Maybe so we don’t have to worry about keeping copies in our old mail program? Let’s face it, if you really want to keep all your old emails, it’s much easier to have them all within the same interface so you don’t have to go hunting around between the several different email programs you used to use and the webmail you now use. It simplifies the search.
In case you didn’t know, you can literally just drag an email from your local folders to the IMAP folders inside Mail.app. It will copy that email, with sent and received dates intact, to the server as if it had always been there. It solves the timestamp issue that the GMail Loader encountered. With the GMail Loader, you can get all your old emails uploaded to Gmail’s servers, but they would show up in the interface list as if they’d just arrived (because it had… it had just arrived on the Gmail servers). When reading the email itself, it would show the actual sent date. Kind of an ugly problem.
Something else I’ve noticed. The way Gmail interacts with IMAP is strange, mostly due to the unorthodox “label” method that Google designed for Gmail instead of folders. Since messages could have more than one label applied, that translates to having the appearance of being in more than one folder inside your IMAP client (obviously I use mail.app). So when you delete a message from one of the IMAP “folders” you are really just removing the label from the message. That is, unless you’ve opted to have your IMAP client store deleted messages on the server (instead of using a local trash bin on the computer).
This is why Google recommends you don’t select that option. It ruins the ability to remove labels from your messages because then when you delete a message, it actually deletes the message. (They’d also like me to not select ‘Store Junk Messages on Server’, but frankly, I’ve not found a bug in letting mail.app work hand-in-hand with the Spam label/folder on Gmail’s servers.)
Of course, if you’re not going to use the Gmail labeling scheme, selecting this option would make your IMAP client behave more like you’d expect. Anyway, just something I thought about, tested, and confirmed.
Loading ...