I've been using gmail via IMAP for at least five years, and haven't found it to be bad at all, though I'm not that fond of its web interface either. I started using gmail with Thunderbird under Windows XP, and switched to using it with Mail.app on OS X about three years ago. I haven't had any serious problems. I started with a whole bunch of nested folders in Thunderbird from 20+ years of POP3 accounts when I switched to gmail IMAP.
First, set up a gmail account and enable IMAP via the web interface. Then add the IMAP gmail account to Thunderbird or Mail.app. I generally didn't explicitly create folders in this account, but instead dragged individual folders from the POP3 accounts onto the gmail account. I was able to drag folders (even heirarchies of folders) from the POP3 accounts to the gmail account. In cases where I had folders with many subfolders (e.g. a "Friends" folder with subfolders for each friend), I did explicitly create the parent folder, and then dragged one or a few subfolders onto it. If the parent folder has messages in it (e.g. in my Friends folder, I also keep messages from misc. friends that I have had very few messages from, and so particularly want to have their own folders), then select all the messages in the folder and explicitly drag the messages into the newly created folder. Since IMAP keeps the client and server in sync, this process also creates the folders on the gmail server. The process is slow and manual, but worked well for me. In the end, you have nicely backed up email that you can access either from your laptop/desktop mail app, or from any computer via the web interface. Also, when I switched to Mac, all I had to do was create the account in Mail.app, and all the folders and messages magically appeared (while burning up a lot of bandwidth - thanks, NCGR for the T3 connection :-), since they already existed on the server. I suspect the idea of lots of nested folders is pretty old fashioned (like me :-) Gmail talks about "labels" instead of folders, which are basically tags. If the labels have embedded slashes, its IMAP treats these as nested folders, so you can have it both ways, although it is a bit ugly to have labels like Friends/Santa Fe/FRIAM/Owen. ;; Gary On Jun 9, 2011, at 9:30 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: > Like many a damn fool, I'm seriously trying to use Gmail, via the web > interface. > > Now, I (possibly mistakenly) presume you, fellow gmail users, are not > going through the tortue I am. In plain words, it Sucks. Really! > > So I must ask you to answer one of two questions: > 1 - How do you bear it? .. Do you have a stunt to make the web UI more usable? > 2 - If not, do you access gmail in some other way? An email client? > Or some other way to avoid the Horror Of It All? > > I will go through a couple of weeks and hope for the best. But > clearly if you can handle this, you have Given Up. > > -- Owen > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Santa Fe Complex > "discuss" group. > To post to this group, send email to disc...@sfcomplex.org > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > discuss+unsubscr...@sfcomplex.org > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/a/sfcomplex.org/group/discuss ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
