I previously blogged about GMail’s support. I was so excited. But after trying it out the excitement died down quickly and I went back to the good old web-based GMail interface.

Here’s the lowdown:

The IMAP server is generally fast, especially when opening small text-only emails. I was able to download 5,400+ email headers from my 2.1 Gigabytes worth of email in less than 3 minutes. Yes I am a very heavy GMail user and I only delete about 1/100 of my emails.

Messages are also downloaded rather quickly, even the ones with attachments.

I got IMAP up and running on Thunderbird without much difficulty, though my first attempt failed and a little troubleshooting revealed that IMAP runs on a different port, 993 (143 is the default). From then on it was all good.

Here is a screenshot of my Thunderbird configuration screen:

Chats will appear in the Thunderbird’s Inbox. For a lot of reasons, I would like to have a way to separate GTalk chats from real e-mails. How hard was it to have a “Chats” folder?

The count for unread messages will only automatically be refreshed for the Inbox. If you want to know how many unread messages a certain tag (folder) has, you have to first click on that folder to get the client to download the headers and only then will it update the unread message count for that folder. Given that I have a billion tags and do not have time to go through all of them, I am forced to read all my unread messages from the Inbox, which renders tags useless.

Tags are automatically converted into folders:

(click on thumbnail for full view)

A special folder called [Gmail] is created within Thunderbird, and beneath it are subfolders corresponding to each one of GMail’s special folders (Inbox, Starred, Sent Mail, Drafts, Spam). So once again it appears that the special folders in GMail are not being mapped properly to the client.

(click on thumbnail for full view)

GMail automatically created 2 labels called “[Imap]/Sent” and “[Imap]/Trash”. I am not sure if this is a behavior specific to Thunderbird, but it appears that the Thunderbird’s native “sent” and “trash” folders are not being mapped properly and instead, Gmail has to create two new tags to identify them.

(click on thumbnail for full view)

The first time I tried to sync with Thunderbird some e-mails and chats did not have dates, so a couple of old e-mails and chats appeared at the top right beside my emails for the day.

Last, but not the least: it appears that I can still search within the body of e-mails without having to download the entire message. I am not sure how this is being done, but I am impressed. Since search is being done locally, results get displayed very very quickly. Though I certainly missed being able to do a “is:sent to:me has:attachment” query in GMail.

All in all, I am not too impressed. Right now, the only reason for me to use an IMAP client is for me to be able to retrieve my e-mails offline, though in order to do this the entire message will have to have been previously downloaded. This would work very well if Thunderbird (or any other IMAP client) had a way to identify e-mails that have already been retrieved in full.

Although I am sure GMail’s engineers worked their best and the shortcomings are probably a result of the IMAP protocol’s inherent limitations, I think I will stick to the web-based GMail interface for now.

Update: check out Google’s announcement from the Official GMail blog.

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