Me too. IMAP through Tbird on macs and pcs.

On 6/9/11 9:07 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:
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

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