Google Mail – Advanced IMAP

Posted on October 11, 2008 No Comments

For those running Google Mail, using IMAP, and playing around with the “Labs” stuff, be sure to check out the new Advanced IMAP controls.

This is cool stuff! For instance, how often do you get a chance to say “expunge” in the real world?

What’s really cool is the ability to control what you see via IMAP by labels. That could save a lot of data traffic for future syncs.

And that well loved [IMAP]/Deleted Items folder? We can kiss it good-bye. Yay!

The IMAP protocol allows messages to be marked for deletion, a sort of limbo state where a message is still present in the folder but slated to be deleted the next time the folder is expunged. In our standard IMAP implementation, when you mark a message as deleted, Gmail doesn’t let it linger in that state — it deletes (or auto-expunges) it from the folder right away. If you want the two-stage delete process, after you’ve enabled this Lab, just select ‘Do not automatically expunge messages’ under the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ tab in Settings.

Most of the labs stuff hasn’t really done much for me (Mail Goggles. Seriously?) but this one may be one of my favorites, right up there with fixed-width fonts and the signature tweaks.

Tags: google-labs, IMAP