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The BIG Reason

Music, opinions, and portfolio of Mark Eagleton, musician and web developer in Northern CA.

Google Teases Folks With IMAP

We have our business email routed through Google's Gmail with their Google Apps for businesses. I hate Gmail quite a bit. Besides its interface (which I find to be atrociously cumbersome and staggeringly unintuitive), I'm one of those people who likes managing all of my email accounts in a stand-alone email application from multiple computers and my phone. IMAP is the ideal protocol for this, but Gmail only allows POP access. This means that you have to separately download every message to every device you need to view it on ... separately. Even the threads of messages you have already deleted from your other computers and devices.

Johnny Cash

We have our business email routed through Google's Gmail with their Google Apps for businesses. I hate Gmail quite a bit. Besides its interface (which I find to be atrociously cumbersome and staggeringly unintuitive), I'm one of those people who likes managing all of my email accounts in a stand-alone email application from multiple computers and my phone. IMAP is the ideal protocol for this, but Gmail only allows POP access. This means that you have to separately download every message to every device you need to view it on ... separately. Even the threads of messages you have already deleted from your other computers and devices.

I have personally sent over ten feature requests to Google begging for IMAP support. Yesterday they finally announced that it's here ... for some people. Obviously, I'm not one of those lucky people.

Google should know that if you don't have enough gum for everyone, it's not polite to whip it out in front of the class.

There is a lot of talk these days about how the future of computing will come from the cloud—as in applications will not be installed no your computer, but instead be hosted services on the internet. In essence, the internet will become the biggest mainframe system ever. As a web developer, I am pretty happy about this. As an early adopter who champs at the bit for the latest release of a favorite software title, it fully bums me out.

The Googles of the world need to get their act together. Launch it or don't. Beta's are for working out bugs. If you want a slow roll out, announce it to your developer community, and hold off with the teasing. That is just mean.

[UPDATE:] Today is Tuesday, October 30th 2007 and I still don't have IMAP access to my email. I'll give it 2 more days before I set up a forwarder to my .Mac account and never touch a Gmail server myself ever again.

[UPDATE:] Today is Tuesday, November 1st 2007 and I IMAP access has been enabled! Google makes it by the skin of their teeth ... For now.