Kyle's Gmail IMAP and Mail.app Primer

IMAP in shining armor came, and now gmail and desktop email can live happily ever after.

Gmail in Mail.app.

Leopard was not all last week brought us tech geeks. Since Gmail was released in 2004, Gmail users have enjoyed the many great things gmail brings, but have savored the idea of free IMAP along with the bundle of joy that is gmail. Our wishes were fulfilled last week when Google announced IMAP-support for gmail. But how can I use it?

Syncing Made Easy

IMAP email, as opposed to POP3, gives us the ability to keep both our web-based and device-based email readers in sync. Most importantly, though, it does this on its own. When you read an email on your desktop email app, that email will show up as "read" in your gmail account; when you archive an email in your gmail account, it will show up in your "All Mail" folder (more on this later) on your desktop email app. Keeping things in sync requires no extra effort on your part. It just takes care of it for you.

The most important benefit of this is that as a result of this constant syncing, using your gmail web-interface and a desktop email app together is now possible. When gmail just used POP3, it was a more or less mutually exclusive affair. If you accessed your gmail account remotely though POP3, the emails you downloaded were either deleted in your gmail account, kept in the inbox, or automatically archived. This created a barrier between online email and your desktop email, because they could never be on the same page. Reading an email in one of them was not reflected in the other, nor deleting one, flagging it, or replying. They were two separate worlds of disparate organization.

IMAP for gmail changes that. Almost all aspects of your email are now synced between your desktop email and your gmail web interface. Gmail will reflect if you read an email in your Apple Mail.app, reply to one, delete an email, put an email in a folder, or flag an email. This is synced almost seamlessly; as soon as you do something on one side, it is reflected on the other side.

Well, this all sounds great. But how can you use it?

Labels and Folders

Instead of using folders to organize emails, Gmail uses "labels," which can automagically be applied to any incoming emails. Labels are more or less the same concept as smart folders. Luckily, through the wonders of IMAP, we can extend this form of organization to our desktop email.

In Mail.app, when you look at your IMAP gmail account, the labels you set up in gmail show up as folders. Thus, if you had "Friends," "Work," and "Misc" labels in gmail, in Mail.app you will have "Friends," "Work," and "Misc" folders.

To apply these labels to emails in Mail.app, simply drag the email from your inbox into the folder you want. This will apply that label to the email, and gmail will automatically reflect that.

You do not have to do this manually, however. You can apply labels to emails in two ways; once involving gmail, and once involving Mail.app. That said, it is more logical to use gmail's technique because it is the first place that handles them.

Apply Labels Automatically

To do this in gmail, log in to your account, click on Settings, and then the Filters tab. This gives you several criterions to select types of emails coming in to apply a label to. These include whom the email is from, who it is to, what the Subject line has in it, what words the email contains, and what words it does not contain. Then it allows you to decide which label to apply to these emails.

The wonderful thing about this technique is these labels will be put in automatically, and they will show up in both gmail and Mail.app. More importantly, though, since the filtering is done through gmail rather than Mail.app, you can make changes to the filtering rules from anywhere.

You can also use Mail.app's Rules function in preferences to do the same thing, but using Gmail's is preferable because of the above reason.

Starring and Flagging

In gmail, you can "star" an email, which places a little star next to it and compiles all "starred" emails in a list so you can access important emails easily. These stars are also synced to Mail.app, but instead of using stars, Mail.app allows you to "flag" emails. It is exactly the same concept, just with a different symbol.

This is a great way to make important emails jump out from the others. This idea can be used very powerfully in conjunction with filters. Filters allow you to star specific types of emails, so whether you are in gmail or Mail.app, emails from an important person (say, your boss, or your wife) are automatically starred/flagged so you will not miss them.

Conclusion

This is just a brief introduction to what you can do with IMAP and gmail, but this is a game-changing event. The ability to keep everything in sync between your gmail account, Mail.app on your desktop, and Mobile Mail on your iPhone is incredible. Moreover, with the power to filter your mail and apply labels and stars to it, your mail will now be easier to manage than ever. Just dive in and begin playing around with it. Soon enough you will find a set up that helps you be productive and make sense of the incredible amount of emails pouring in.

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