I heard a while back that Gmail had begin offering IMAP with some of its accounts, and not really knowing what all this IMAP banter was about, I decided to check my account settings to see if it had indeed been enabled. Sadly, at that point (maybe a few months ago) it had not, and I had to wait – or actually forget about it.
Gmail is generally awesome on it’s own, just as a webmail client. It beats hotmail/live and yahoo and whatever else is thrown at it hands down with its general simplicity, keyboard shortcuts, space and pretty much anything else (it even has a mark as read button – Hotmail did not!). Then I was lucky enough to discover that Gmail had POP! Wow! That was such a relief, an ISP independant free email service that offered POP. It was amazing enough to replace my current default email address (which at that time was at virgin.net!). POP was absolutely peachy for so long, and in fact it still would be had I not discovered that IMAP was actually working on my account. On updating my iPhone to 1.1.4, the Gmail automatically interfaced with the IMAP side of Gmail, and not the POP side, which I thought was very odd initially. Partly because I had no experience with IMAP before and also partly due to the fact that my Gmail mailboxes were set up in a special way so that all of the read mail on my Mac would move to the All Mail folder, thus the inbox would only contain the old messages from before I changed this setting! As soon as my iPhone’s mail was up and running, it started to retrieve all these old messages and these folders too (Starred, All Mail, etc.) and I was a bit ‘wtf?’. But I eventually caught on to the fact that it was IMAP, and subsequently changed the settings on Mail to use Gmail as IMAP and disable the POP account, so that all my new mail was done thru IMAP.
This was initially such a revolution. Previously when I read my mail from either my phone or my Mac, it would still appear on the other as unread, so if I perchance, went a while without checking one or the other, then when I did check it, it would have lots and lots of new messages! Not really a great thing! Now with IMAP, all the messages are pretty much synchronized so that if I read one in one place, it’ll appear in the other place still, but read! Isn’t that incredible! I still haven’t got over it clearly, and to think I’ve been missing this for what, 22 years!.
Anyway, the point hat I’m getting at is that now I’m all clued in with IMAP, the POP accounts I have and use sometimes, such as my mohoyt.com one, still dump all of their messages in my mailbox even though I’ve read like all of them! It’s really quite irratating! But I’m over it!