Since I have several times been rather loud in my… we’ll call it “encouragement”… for Google to provide IMAP access to their hosted GMail mail, it’s only fair that I’m equally loud in my gratitude and accolades now that they’ve done just that!!
Woot!!
Although they don’t explicitly list KMail as a supported client on their setup page, it, of course, works just fine. And I’m ecstatic that I can now get rid of one more layer of technical complexity (okay, it’s a stupid, ugly, storage-duplicating hack, just like everybody else has had to do) in my email setup.
Again, Woot!!!
Google: you have made a big step just now in not doing evil. Thank you!!! Please give everyone involved in GMail over IMAP a big raise. =:)
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
I too have no IMAP in my settings, but can still use it. Just setup your preferred mail client with imap.gmail.com and smtp.gmail.com and it should just work…
Saturday October 27, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Well, it looks like you’re luckier than me :/
Here is what I get when trying to use the IMAP :
[ALERT] IMAP is not available for your account. (Failure) authentication not supported
Saturday October 27, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Hey Pinaraf,
I saw somewhere that they’re rolling it out to all users, but it might take a little bit of time. The announcement came on 10/23, but my IMAP access didn’t work until just yesterday (10/26). So just keep waiting for it. =:) Also, I think I saw somewhere that you might have to log out and back in to your gmail account to get it to recognize the change, although I don’t think that I had to.
Saturday October 27, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Food for thoughts for all you guys who forget about the “freedom as in liberty” aspect of Free Software:
http://www.kuarepoti-dju.net/index.php?p=123
Key sentence: “Today, many user use a free desktop to check their GMail, then tune in to some Shoutcast beats, and finally think of doing their daily backup by uploading some files to Amazon S3. At the end of the day, they did use some free client applications – but likewise they did leave precious data at proprietary service providers. When freedom and privacy are equally challenged, people should shout loudly and stop using those services. But instead, they spend their time developing more interfaces for them.”
This is not meant as a flame against your joy and celebrating mood. But, as I said, food for thought. Please give it some brain-time.
Saturday October 27, 2007 at 3:34 pm
How on earth does this say anything about evilness or not?
If anything, this is a step TOWARDS evil – I bet if POP3 wasn’t so common they would cut it out. Why? Because they want to control the information ofcourse. I realize they save a copy anyway, but without pop3 they’d have even tighter control.
Saturday October 27, 2007 at 10:28 pm
I’ll be sticking to POP3 myself, I like having a copy on my hard disk but still nice work Google! You’ve made a lot of people happy.
Re:Someone.
If google was being evil by useing IMAP to keep E-mail hostage on their servers, don’t you think they would have done IMAP first?
Sunday October 28, 2007 at 3:47 am
interesting.
I’ll be sticking with pop; I can’t assume I’ll have net access when I need it, and I’m also spooked by the rumours of the occasional gmail account getting deleted/locked-out/etc.
now if only the gmail team would remove the need for konq to masquerade as firefox…
Sunday October 28, 2007 at 4:35 am
Well, not for everybody :/
Saturday October 27, 2007 at 1:56 pmI still don’t have IMAP available in the settings.
How old is your account and how much storage do you use ? (Mine is over 30 months old, and I use 16% of the currently available storage)