Gmail Advanced IMAP Features speeds up IMAP and dIMAP on Kmail (and others)

I currently use my gmail account with Kmail using dIMAP on openSUSE 11.0 running on KDE 3.5.10. I at times thought of moving to straight IMAP, but I loved having the offline features. However, this was painfully slow since it had to download everything twice (once in your “All Mail” and once in each of your folders which contain your messages that have been “labeled”). Not to mention another download once you moved them to your trash etc.

However, this has all changed with the Advanced features for IMAP in Google Labs. To enable this features log into your Gmail account, go to Settings, Labs and enable the following feature:
Google Labs

Now click on “Labels”.

Here you can uncheck All Mail and Trash. This limits the amount of mail that actually gets replicated (if using dIMAP), or refreshed (if using standard IMAP).

Now click on “Forwarding POP/IMAP” to configure some other great features. Why would you change these? Well because now, you don’t have to keep dragging the message to the Gmail trash folder, you can just delete in your local client, and it’ll move it to Gmail Trash automatically (about time).

Here are the settings I chose:
IMAP Advanced Settings

Read to official Gmail Advanced IMAP Blog Post

Now with IMAP I have the convenience of POP, with the great features and abilities of IMAP.

Need to set up Gmail IMAP / POP?, find that here

Need to download openSUSE? Get that here

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About ben.kevan

I am ben kevan.. Well yeah. .that's about it.

6 Comments

  • October 13, 2008 | Permalink |

    Very nice Ben. the duplication of downloads was getting on my nerves. Cheers!

  • ben.kevan
    October 13, 2008 | Permalink |

    Hey Pete,

    Very glad it helped you out. It was the most annoying thing for me also. The other major annoyence was the deletion of messages (you had to drag them to “trash” for them to go away correctly on the gnail server).

    But now, both those issues are gone :o )

    I couldn’t be happier.

  • Ed Daniel
    February 14, 2009 | Permalink |

    Just wondering how you would take advantage of having incoming/outgoing in one folder as per the All Mail folder, being as one is forced to sync the inbox folder, as one has the benefit of seeing whole conversation that way – any suggestions or tips you could share t make it so?

  • February 15, 2009 | Permalink |

    @Ed Daniel

    Hi Ed,

    Not quite sure what you’re getting at. Also, I have moved completely from Kmail and moved into Opera Mail (I’m going to blog about this when I have time hopefully within the next 2 weeks. I have a major Stress Test going on of our new ebusiness website for work).

    I actually keep all mail from being checked via my imap directory, and in gmail I have things “skip” the inbox, and go directly to a label (via filters in gmail).

    With the advanced IMAP features in Gmail you can make IMAP do just about anything you want, and act how you want. Just try removing some of the folders / labels from your IMAP sync’ing to see if that’s the behavior you were looking for.

  • June 28, 2009 | Permalink |

    Lashely slapped the beast around last night for sure!

  • November 19, 2009 | Permalink |

    Change your thoughts and you change your world.

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