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Gmail's IMAP Support

I work for a small software development shop consisting of 5 employees. We're all spread out throughout different parts of the country. Therefore, we've all have been using our own Internet host's POP email account for our company email. The hosting company that hosts our company domain allows us to forward emails that come into our company email addresses to our actual local Internet email accounts. This has worked fairly nicely, but there are downsides to this approach. For example, if you live in MS Outlook like we all do, you have a problem when you need access to your email while you're away from your main desktop PC. Your Outlook and Gmail and your mobile device are never really in sync.

So, several months ago I switched over to GMail and had my company emails forwarded there. All has worked out pretty well. I was especially excited when they introduced IMAP support. This means I can work in Outlook and everything is synchronized up to the cloud. When I switch over to the Gmail web interface, everything is there. I mentioned in my previous post that this is essentially the Holy Grail of email.

Unfortunately, all is not perfect yet. The biggest downside is that there is currently a bug with support for Windows Mobile devices and Gmail's IMAP support. Most messages viewed on the device come up with blank message bodies. This has been widely reported and I'm a little surprised at how slow Google has been to come up with a fix for it, especially considering how many devices these days run Windows Mobile as the device OS. It's been a little over a month now, and no resolution yet.

Another downside has little to do with Gmail's IMAP support and much more to do with MS Outlook's support for IMAP. Things are at times painfully slow with Outlook. Seems like there are some threading issues blocking the UI when certain things are occurring involving synchronization of messages with Gmail. Not enough to get me to quit using IMAP with Outlook, but enough to make me think that IMAP is not something Microsoft is really focussed on making better (Outlook has been notoriously bad with IMAP support for ages).

So, one can hope that Google gets the IMAP fix out there for Windows Mobile devices and that Microsoft can do something with their lousy IMAP support in Outlook. One can hope, right?

Tags Gmail IMAP Windows Mobile Outlook

posted by John Walker @ 12/22/2007 12:54:00 AM

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Hey FWA FWA
You should try GMail IMAP for Mobile again because they fixed that Mobile Issue.
You Puddle Jumper.

posted @ 3/31/2008 4:33:00 PM by Scott Pettersen

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I gave up and bought an iPhone :)

In all seriousness, you're right, they did fix it. How's things Mr. Stone?

posted @ 3/31/2008 5:37:00 PM by John Walker

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Gmail's IMAP Support

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