Limi’s Concept Zone

Yes, it’s finally happened, Gmail will now support IMAP! Now I have been using Gmail for nearly a year, and one of the features I missed was the ability to check my mail over IMAP. But the question is, how much Gmail functionality has been lost or compromised in order for this to happen?

Gmail doesn’t currently support folders of any kind, it has “labels” instead, which act in a similar way. That you associate a word with e-mails, more like tagging really. I would probably suggest that labels will exist as folders, as its the only way to keep some sanity, otherwise no one would use IMAP at all.

However, what about the lovely threading view that Gmail does, this obviously won’t follow into IMAP, which is a shame, because its one of those things that actually cleans up my mailbox. If you happen to be on a mailing list of any kind, it threads out the e-mails you receive, so that you can read it like a forum post. But this will be lost with IMAP.

Other things lost would be the Google searching and the archiving of mail, I can again only guess that archiving will exist within IMAP as another (albeit rather large) folder on IMAP. Which sort of defeats the purpose.

As nice as it is for Gmail to support IMAP, I think that the number of features that will be lost just make it like any other e-mail service, short of the fancy tech name and the hype it has surrounding it, but the majority of these hype features are lost. But I guess they are always available at the web-site, but does’nt that defeat the purpose of offering IMAP?