Greetings, email users! Even if you are not a regular user of Google's Gmail service, would you please take a minute to visit their feature suggestion page and write in their "I have a better idea" box the following four letters:
IMAP
IMAP would let us use our regular desktop email clients to get messages from our Gmail accounts.
Be sure to add your email address to the form and submit it when you're done. Feel free to add a couple other things to the submission, as long as you include IMAP.
IMAP has long been an absent feature in Gmail, and while I understand the need to display ads on every page of their web interface (I've never clicked any of these, by the way) to generate money from the service, I don't see why they couldn't come up with some way to make money while using IMAP. They're the geniuses, after all.
Right after that, they can concoct a way I can log into my AdSense account without flipping through that stupid page with the screenshot of that Dog Naming Service. I'm so sick of seeing that thing.
Since Google provides POP3/SMTP access to GMail accounts (without ads) I'm doubtful that Google has eschewed IMAP due to an inability to generate ad revenue. I'd wager that it's more of an implementational problem. GMail has been designed around a flat hierarchy (or lack thereof) using tags and searching to achieve "order"; how does one build an IMAP hierarchical directory structure on top of that and make it work in a sane manner?
I have long been waiting for IMAP too. It would be great to have an straight-forward IMAP Gmail solution withouth having to go through other steps just to make it work.
But if you really need to enable IMAP, Mike Davidson gives a pretty easy way to go about it. Link
Using this method, I am now able to access my Gmail accounts on my PDA phone.
yes! i have been wanting this for a year.
but it's true, there isn't a great way to correlate labels with folders. the only two options are to either eschew all folders and have a labelless experience from the gui client, or to make some wacky proprietary scheme where an email can be in more than one folder.
cliff: It's not my implementation problem. ;)
John Bachir: Google wrote their own OS for high-demand distributed search indexing. I don't think it's beyond them to write a proprietary IMAP service that can allow messages to be in more than one folder at once.
I wrote: IMAP with SSL connectivity
I would love Google forever if they did add IMAP to Gmail. Forever.
As far as I know, Gmail does have folders:
All Mail
Junk Mail
Trash
There are several built-in labels:
Inbox
Starred
Sent
Drafts
Of course, you can add your own labels beyond those. I think it's more of a policy decision not to let people upload old mail because it would fill up their hard drives too fast. How hard would it be to disable folder creation and just not let people subscribe to folders besides the ones that are built-in? Then again, they did release GDrive. They can't be that hard up on hard drive space.