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Using Gmail with an IMAP account

GmailMike Davidson, who is the CEO of Newsvine and half the brains behind the sIFR web typography project, has written a useful guide to getting Gmail to work with an IMAP account.

You cannot access a Gmail account directly over IMAP as you can with POP, but you can—as Mike describes—set your Gmail account up to auto-forward mail into a dedicated IMAP account.

As a result, he says:

Since Gmail’s auto-forwarding feature leaves headers for the most part intact, I can now receive fully synched, fully intact copies of all my Gmail messages to any computer I happen to be on.

The best of both worlds.IMAP, gmail, auto-forwarding, email, POP, apple mail, mail.app

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This entry was posted on Friday, 14th April, 2006 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Apple Mail, Email in general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Using Gmail with an IMAP account”

  1. Ted Pavlic says:
    April 19th, 2006 at 4:24 am

    Personally, I think it would be smarter forwarding copies of mail from a PRIVATE account TO Google.

    Right now my unfiltered mail goes to my private IMAP provider and its spam filters then through my spam filters and then into my inbox. That unfiltered mail also gets copied and goes to Google. I login to Google periodically to “report spam” to train its spam filter. I also train my local spam filters. My private account gets two to three spam messages a month in the inbox and no false positives. My Google account (with the same mail) gets hundreds of spam messages in the mailbox PER WEEK and frequently finds false positives.

    Google does a terrible job filtering spam. It’s true they have a great way to archive and search for mail.

    So if you’re going to get your own IMAP account somewhere else, just make that your mail address. Forward COPIES of your FILTERED mail to Google as an archive. Set Google up as your SMTP server too so you can save copies of your outgoing mail as well. This config (notably different than the one suggested above), to me, is best of both worlds.

  2. Tim says:
    April 19th, 2006 at 7:33 am

    @Ted, another great comment! I might blog that up as a post in its own right, if that’s OK with you.

  3. Ted Pavlic says:
    April 19th, 2006 at 7:36 am

    That sounds fine with me. Glad I could help. :)

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