IMAP, You Map

As a newly minted Apple fan boy, I’m naturally enamoured with the iPhone, iMac (though I don’t own one) and all things “i”. But I have to say that with IMAP, Apple has really outdone itself. Thanks, Steve, you’ve totally revolutionized my email consumption experience.

(rim shot)

But seriously. Until very recently, I’ve been a fully POP-enabled shop, with Thunderbird as my mail client. My email has resided on my laptop and nowhere else, so I never had problems with synchronization. But I have had a number of issues that led me to seek a better solution. In particular, I don’t always want to be schlepping around my laptop. And Thunderbird lacks certainly capabilities like full-text indexing that have been looking more and more like necessities.

This came to a head when I finally got a smartphone (though an iPhone, not a Nokia E90 as I originally expected). Suddenly synchronization became a big issue, and last time I was traveling I ended up closing Thunderbird, configuring OS X’s Mail app to use my POP server (since TB can’t redirect mails based on a filter) and sending all new mails to Gmail, where I could pick them up from my phone. This was a clunky solution, to say the least; the cherry on the cake was that I had to clean out my Thunderbird inbox when I got home and loaded all the mails received during the trip (which I had instructed Mail to leave on the server) into what was (and is) still my primary email client.

Anyway, when Google announced that it had added IMAP support to Gmail, I was eager to give it a try. Sure enough, it’s brilliant. I can continue to use Thunderbird in exactly the same way as before when I’m sitting at my laptop. (Lifehacker has an excellent article about how to configure TB for optimal use with Gmail.) Setting up IMAP on my phone was a snap as well. I can access my mail from any web-enabled computer using Gmail directly, with its innovative handling of labels and threads, not to mention the fact that I can full-text search my entire email database in milliseconds. I’ve already unearthed a number of mails that I would never have found otherwise. I can even browse mails on my phone that I’ve filtered into other folders, like mailing lists and bugmails, something that would be impossible with POP. And obviously my mails are now synchronized across all these devices.

Kudos to Google for getting on the IMAP bandwagon, as I can imagine that this is a real challenge to implement in a way that scales.

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3 Comments »

1. I dislike Google harvesting content from my e-mail for advertising and stories it in servers (never actually deleted) until the end of time. That makes me want to use my own IMAP server, which is generally what I do…

   Comment by Al Billings — 11/6/2007 @ 7:47 pm

2. Google Mail has a really fine midlet that looks pretty much like GMail itself, with conversations, on-demand download and so on. They’ve supported that for quite a while and it works a lot better for me than the IMAP client on my phone because, well, its just a lot faster

   Comment by Ingo — 11/6/2007 @ 10:40 pm

3. Just as a note, it appears that IMAP does not work with all ISPs. This is discussed in a number of places, including Wikipedia (search on IMAP).

   Comment by Doug Stewart — 11/28/2007 @ 2:10 pm

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