Thursday, January 03, 2008

My Gmail IMAP experience

Well I have been testing the Gmail IMAP feature and so far Mozilla Thunderbird is the winner from the client side. First a little background I have roughly 79,000 pieces of mail in my Gmail account which takes about 1.6GB of storage.

In addition to Thunderbird I have also been using Outlook 2007 and MailStore. Well Outlook took forever to pull down my mail and in general Outlook is now so slow I'm going to have to remove the IMAP account for Gmail from my account list. In addition Outlook times out trying to pull updates from Gmail. Well MailStore has a similar problem it also times out and took over a day to pull in all my mail from Gmail. MailStore is also very slow to pull in new updates. Now the reason Thunderbird may be working well is the fact that Thunderbird does not pull in all the mail from my various folders until you click on the folder the first time. Also to be fair as far as being slow pulling in mail all 3 programs average about 300kbps so that would seem to be a Google or IMAP protocol issue since I can consistently access other sites at a sustained rate of well over 2Mbps on my 6Mbps DSL connection.

In case your wondering why I'm testing Gmail IMAP it's because I'm hooked on Gmail but wanted to have a backup in case Google happens to mess up my account, delete my Inbox etc.

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