Kurtopia

Now that Gmail offers IMAP access, I’ve moved my personal email to Gmail using Google Apps.  However, I’ve found a few characteristics of Gmail’s IMAP implementation that make it less than ideal, and they are quirks (to put it mildly) that seem a little baffling.

My biggest annoyance is what happens when you delete a message using an email client.  Instead of actually deleting the message, it removes the Inbox label from it, but otherwise leaves the message in your mailbox.  Huh?  Silly me, I would have thought that pressing Delete in my email client would have the same effect as pressing Delete in the Gmail web interface.  Instead, you have to move the message into the Trash folder, rendering the Delete function of your email client totally useless.

I’ve also noticed that messages with HTML content don’t show any content whatsoever in Windows Mobile 5.  Now, I realize that Gmail’s IMAP implementation doesn’t necessarily support Windows Mobile 5 (it specifically lists Windows Mobile 6–err… at least it did at one point), but come on… showing absolutely nothing for HTML messages is a little ridiculous.  Every other IMAP account I’ve ever configured on my Windows Mobile 5 smartphone hasn’t had this problem.

I thought this was going to be the answer to my email dilemma, but at the moment, that’s questionable at best.  Unfortunately, I’ve already transferred a lot of my email to Gmail, so I suppose I’ll muddle along for now until I find the Holy Grail of personal email hosting.

UPDATE:  Fortunately, I’m not the only one who ran into the Windows Mobile problem, and apparently it’s affecting both WM5 & 6.  Google knows about it, and is allegedly working toward a solution.  If they fix this, I think I can live with the Delete weirdness.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.