Gmail IMAP - Mailboxes vs Labels Nightmare

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Level 2

290 points

Gmail IMAP - Mailboxes vs Labels Nightmare

Hi,

Do any of you use a Gmail IMAP account with Apple Mail in Leopard? Is it working alright for you? I got it all set it up, but I find it very confusing to use...

Suppose I get an e-mail from someone called Steve, and I want to file that e-mail in my Steve mailbox, what do I do in Apple Mail? Normally (with a POP3 account) I would drag it, and it would move from the inbox to the Steve mailbox. However, that's not the way Gmail works is it? With Gmail, the e-mail is either stored in your Inbox or in All Mail. You don't move e-mails into mailboxes or folders, you tag them with the appropriate label.

How can this EVER make sense in Apple Mail? These 2 different approaches to storing and organising e-mail seem to be totally different and in conflict with each other.

 iMac 17" 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB Hard Drive, Mac OS X (10.5.2),  16 GB iPod Touch,  40 GB Apple TV Take 2

Posted on Mar 15, 2008 5:28 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 15, 2008 3:49 PM in response to Reuben Feffer

Have a read through the article on [how do actions sync in IMAP|http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77657].

IMAP is just a view of the messages which are stored on the server, and how GMail handles it online & behind the scenes can be quite different from what they show you via IMAP, and hence how you handle it on the client side... You can choose to keep a local copy for caching & offline access, but in the case of labels, keep in mind that just means more copies of the same message if it has more than one label in Gmail.

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Answer 2

Reuben Feffer Author

Level 2

290 points

Mar 16, 2008 5:57 AM in response to Andrew Vit

Thanks a lot for your reply, and thanks a lot for the link to that article. I appreciate it.

According to that article, if I move a message to a folder in Apple Mail, that means a label is applied to the message on the web. But, in my experience, moving a message doesn't move the entire thread, so you end up spliting the thread in two. Also, the iPhone/iPod Touch has no Copy function. So, I can't add multiple labels to one message.

Is Gmail IMAP more trouble than it's worth? The iPhone/iPod Touch doesn't show threading, which puts things off to a bad start. And the concept of moving messages into folders is totally different to tagging threads with labels. I currently can't understand how anyone uses Gmail IMAP successfully on their iPhone/iPod Touch, without making a total mess of what's going on online, in Gmail on the web.

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Answer 3

Mar 24, 2008 8:16 PM in response to Reuben Feffer

Have you used the Gmail feature on the google mobile for iphone? it shows conversations and all the "label" mailboxes.

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Answer 4

Reuben Feffer Author

Level 2

290 points

Mar 25, 2008 1:02 PM in response to Steve Ehlers

Yeah, I've used that feature. I really would like to be able to use Apple's Mail.app on the iPod Touch/iPhone with a .Mac IMAP account, but I'm having trouble getting that to work 100%. So it looks like I won't bother buying .Mac and instead just have to use Gmail and Google's Google Mobile interface on the iPod Touch.

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Answer 5

Kevin Horn

Level 4

1,836 points

Mar 25, 2008 2:44 PM in response to Reuben Feffer

I've found Gmail to be nothing but trouble used on anything other than a web browser.

.Mac is made to work flawlessly with Apple apps and devices. For a while I quit .Mac and went on a search for better (and cheaper) IMAP email. After 6 months I was back with .Mac wishing I'd never left. The $99 is worth if for the email alone but since they've increased disk space to 10 GB it's a bargain.

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