Michael Pobega wrote:
That's a matter of opinion. I use Google's IMAP services and I love it, especially because all of the filtering is done server-side so it saves me time and energy. I really don't see what's so "atrocious" about it.
It's off topic but you asked:It uses labels instead of folders and folders in client as labels in webmail. Because of this there's some strange (read counterintuitive) behaviour.
If you copy a message from one folder to another in your IMAP client in Gmail it simplys adds another label to it. If you set Gmail's Trash folder as your Deleted in your IMAP client you'll run into problems. After copying your message between folders, try moving it to the Trash - oops all copies of your message have gone.
Gmail does not recognise new mail it only recognises read and unread statuses - found this out on the Claws Mail list. This prevents a lot of IMAP clients with popup notifications from working properly.
This ridiculous 'All Mail' nonsense. When you delete a message from a folder, if you haven't set Gmails Trash as your deleted folder in your IMAP client, the message remains in the 'All Mail' folder. Very confusing. So if you want to delete a message and you've setup IMAP in this way you have to delete it twice, once from the folder and a second time from the 'All Mail' folder.
All this rubbish could have been avoided by simply using folders and not labels - but no Google had to do their own way. The cynics, me included, would argue that Google doesn't want you to delete e-mail so they can data mine it. You make up your own mind.
On a more general note, you can't disable the spam filters at all, Yahoo, AOL and GMX allow this. And as I've already mentioned Gmail doesn't display mail you've sent to mailing lists you're on, have a look at this link for some more info:
http://brian.pontarelli.com/2007/12/22/gmail-imap-doesnt-work-for-mailing-lists-conversations/All in all Gmail is a very poor service. When I used it with IMAP I continously had to fight it to get it to do what I wanted it to do. Unfortunately most of the free IMAP services have some sort of limitations but Gmail's problems beggars belief at times.
Anyway I hope this answers your query. Ananda