Comments on: Gmail… IMAP… filters… /me sighs

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 07:48:36 +0000

Gmail’s IMAP implementation sucks. Any email you delete from the inbox just has the “inbox” filter removed – it still resides in the archive. In many cases, you’re also downloading emails twice, or more.

I’m using Dreamhost’s email right now, but there’s also GMX.com if you’re looking for a free alternative with some sane IMAP.

By: vdanen

vdanen — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:13:24 +0000

Adam: I thought about that. I thought about using fetchmail+procmail on my server, and having procmail filter into mailboxes for me to use with dovecot (already using exim for outbound mail so no changes there). So the advantage there is I can use any imap client to connect from anywhere, and I also thought about roundcube which is pretty slick.

But, aside from logging in from any old computer, I didn’t much see the point as I can currently ssh into my box to use mutt. So I lose the “use my mom’s computer” to check email, but I don’t think I’d ever do that anyways, and besides, anything coming to me personally ends up on my blackberry.

I think it would be more effort than it’s worth. If I were using a GUI mail client and not mutt then it might be worthwhile, but I still find all GUI clients suck compared to mutt. =)

Misc: I’m going to look at that blog post. Thanks for that.

By: Misc

Misc — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:37:58 +0000

Then i suggest to open a 2nd gmail account to check , and to forward some of your spam, etc on this mailbox, and then play with it.

But according to http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2008/03/03/a-few-months-of-google-imap-lets-evaluate, you seems to be quite right with the imap implementation of google.

By: Adam Williamson

Adam Williamson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:27:09 +0000

Why not just run fetchmail + procmail + courier and have your own damn IMAP server? That’s what I do. I have a VM on my dedicated VM host machine that runs as a mailserver: fetchmail, procmail, courier and postfix. I can use it directly as an IMAP / SMTP (authenticated, obviously…) server from any system, and my webserver VM runs roundcubemail so I have a nice AJAX-y webmail frontend to it, for use from any system where I can’t use a dedicated email client.

Been working very nicely for several years now.

By: vdanen

vdanen — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:47:14 +0000

Hmmm… I wonder how that would work with gmail. I’m not confident in their “standards” at the moment. Fiddling with an IMAP client to delete everything in the spam folder somehow moved it all to my inbox and when I finally turned fetchmail back on, I had almost 1200 spam in my inbox that was downloaded. =(

By: Misc

Misc — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:09:48 +0000

You should take a look at imapfilter, for remote imap filtering. Quite powerful, I used it on a exchange server for 3 years without trouble. You can move, copy, delete mail absed on various criteria.

The only problem is that the config is in lua, so yu have a new language to learn, but that’s quite easy and the examples are quite good.