gmail becomes an option
It looks like gmail is about to become a reasonable option for me. There are reports of select accounts getting IMAP support.
This is actually kind of funny. About three years ago, Larry and Sergey were visiting Mozilla to meet with Mitchell and Brendan and some others when Sergey and I happened to start talking about gmail. I asked him why it didn't have IMAP support. His answer was something to the effect of "I'm not sure. I don't personally use IMAP." We talked a bit more about it and I tried to convince him that IMAP was much more in line with webmail since both dealt with location independence so well. He promised that he'd take that feedback to the team.
Now, I'm sure I had nothing to do with it, but it's still great to see that it's finally coming. I can't wait. Being able to utilize gmail's amazing search capabilities using the web interface while also being able to use Thunderbird for a more comfortable (to me) daily usage setup is going to probably move me from my own hosting setup to Google's.
update: well, it's not available on my account yet but according to the gmail blog, it should be soon.
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
Maybe it wasn't a coincidence. :)
At any rate if you don't see the IMAP option you can try logging out of Gmail and then logging back in. After I did that I had the new option.
Posted by: Ryan Wagner | October 24, 2007 4:40 PM
That's nice, though, for me, Gmail becomes increasingly less attractive to me, since I now seem to be unable to send Exe and (most importantly) Zip files. What do I need two gigabytes of storage for, when I can't even send compressed files?
I'm pretty sure that this is a security measurement, because Exe files likely to be viruses and Zip files aren't as easily searchable for viruses, especially when they're encrypted. However, this shrinks usability a lot.
By the way: Gmail's Archive folder stores all email, no matter whether sent by yourself or already downloaded via POP, so IMAP isn't such a big deal here, when you only want to download emails on one computer.
Posted by: Aaron Strontsman | October 25, 2007 8:07 AM