handyfloss

I recently discovered that Gmail offers IMAP access to the service. I must admit that I have never used IMAP, but it is a very good idea for simplifying the access to one’s account from anywhere, and having your e-mail always up to date in any number of computers. You can think of IMAP as all the good things of POP3 (custom UI, great flexibility) and web-mail (central repository of messages) together, without their drawbacks.

Although I think Google is an evil company that wants to take the world over, I have surrendered to their superb e-mail service, Gmail, with its huge inbox and fast and reliable access. I was happy with POP3, go figure with IMAP…

Of course, I have had to configure my e-mail client, KMail, to use IMAP. For that, I have followed the instructions, e.g., in linux.wordpress.org.

First, you have to allow IMAP connection to Gmail. For that, you just need to go to Settings in your Gmail account, then Forwarding and POP/IMAP, and Enable IMAP (I think it’s on by default).

Second, create an IMAP account in KMail: Settings -> Configure KMail -> Accounts -> Add -> IMAP. You will be prompted for some info:

• Account name: anything to let you identify it.
• Login: your full Gmail address.
• Host: imap.gmail.com
• Port: 993

Small trick: the default Trash folder is “Local Folders/trash”. If you keep this, when you “delete” a message from the IMAP account, it will be moved to the “General” KMail trash. The problem is that it means moving the message outside the IMAP tree, and I have found that the IMAP mechanism (probably as a security measure) keeps a copy of the message in the original location (i.e., it is actually not erased). To avoid that, you can put something like “Gmail IMAP/[Gmail]/Trash” as Trash folder, and make the deleted message be moved to the Trash inside the IMAP folder. There, it is deleted exactly as if you access your Gmail account from the web and click on “Delete”.

Third, in the Security tab of the dialog window we have just filled, choose “Use SSL for secure mail download” in Encryption and “Clear Text” in Authentication method.

That’s it, you’re done!

So far I have only used IMAP at home (lousy 300 kb connection), and I think it is a bit on the slow side of the scale, but except for that, I am starting to love IMAP.