MBOX-Line: From blong at google.com  Wed May 18 22:00:30 2011
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Brandon Long <blong@google.com>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:46 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] Beat up on Gmail
In-Reply-To: <4DD4617A.8040001@verizon.net>
References: <BANLkTimVNPwLV4gJ+aYCOGyDd-BN_Ka4PA@mail.gmail.com>
	<4DD4617A.8040001@verizon.net>
Message-ID: <BANLkTikD8BmgibQcJ=cuAW_LzAerhcVK6w@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:16 PM, Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 05/18/2011 05:36 PM, Brandon Long wrote:
>>
>> I think this is a difference of opinion and not of fact. Obviously
>> Gmail and IMAP have different models of a mailbox, and our
>> implementation had to bridge these two models. ?You're implying that
>> we should have had folders which had no analogue in the web interface,
>> and we should have exposed IMAP labels as keywords and somehow solved
>> the same problem that this thread was asking about, perhaps as base32
>> encoded keywords.
>
> My experience over the past several years has been that people who use email
> clients instead of webmail tend to be a more overly conservative bunch of
> people than those who do not use them. In that vein, the people who would be
> accessing Gmail over IMAP would probably have preferred the traditional
> folder model over Gmail's label concepts; I remember my disappointment to
> have discovered that my "normal" email usage model just didn't well with
> Gmail's implementation (what? delete doesn't actually delete the mail?)

Its not the default, no, but there is a setting for that.  You
currently have to enable the Advanced IMAP settings lab, and then you
can select that delete means "move to trash" or "delete forever".  It
applies to the message when its been removed from the last visible
folder.

There's also a setting to disable auto-expunge.  Both of these were
the defaults originally, but were changed when testing clearly showed
that the expected user experience matched somewhat with what Mark
said: people expected a Gmail like experience in their client.  The
main use and clients turned out to be mobile devices, the number of
users who use a desktop IMAP client to access Gmail is pretty tiny.

As for Outlook, we've had a bunch of weird issues with it, and instead
we wrote a plug-in for Outlook, which also gave us the ability to sync
contacts and calendar, no IMAP involved:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/outlook_sync.html

I'm sure these settings aren't the full picture,  most flags/keywords
still apply to the message across folders, for example, and I'm sure
there are a couple other ones.

>> No client our users actually used would have done
>> anything with the keywords,
>
> If this information were made public, I'm sure knowledgeable people would
> have asked for some kind of standardization in this regard.
>
> P.S. Gmail is not the Google product I reserve special ire for... that would
> be Google Groups. But that is a rant well off-topic for this, er, mailing
> list.

My team has recently taken over the mail handling aspects of Groups,
if you have requests, feel free to forward them to me off list.
They're also working on the new web interface, available here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview

If you're talking about it being a Usenet gateway, then I probably
already know the rant.

Brandon
-- 
?Brandon Long <blong@google.com>
?Staff Engineer
?Gmail Delivery TLM

