Use G-Mail's IMAP Feature with KMail
G-Mail now supports IMAP access for all e-mail accounts. IMAP is great because it allows you to sync your emails between multiple computers or e-mail clients. You can use it in KMail, a free e-mail client for Linux, as well.
1. Login to your G-Mail account. In the upper right hand corner, click Settings.
2. Navigate to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
3. Mark the circle for Enable IMAP in the last section and then Save Changes.
4. Mark IMAP in dialog that appears.
5. Now open up KMail.
6. Go to Settings>Configure KMail
7. On the sidebar, choose Accounts.
8. On the right, click Add.
9. Here are the fields that you must change under the General Tab:
- Login: Type in your full e-mail address, including gmail.com or whatever your domain is
- Host: Type in imap.gmail.com
You may also want to the account name, have your password stored, enable interval mail checking, or whatever you prefer.
10. Under the Security tab of the same window, mark Use SSL for secure mail download under Encryption.
Now, next time you retrieve mail, you should find your new GMail IMAP account under the mail tree. Keep in mind that it may be a bit slow to get everything downloaded if you have a lot of mail.
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For outgoing mail, you must use the SMTP server as always. If you do not already have this set up, then you find several helpful tutorials via Google, such as the latter part of this article.
Also on How To Geek is how to set up KMail with Windows Vista Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Microsoft Outlook.
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I set that up intially too, and maybe it is just my gmail account, but I found IMAP intolerably slow. Obviously, I prefer imap to pop, so I set it up initially. I'm on a fast university network connection, and even still - everytime I click on a "folder" (which is really a label) it take minutes to pull up any of the items. Perhaps this is because of the amount of labelled items I have, but gmail in a browser opens them up quickly.
This isn't a kmail issue, Outlook was intolerably slow in the same way. So given the new gmail updates improves the speed on the web version (and makes contacts section usable), I don't see the value imap brings.
As an aside, if you are using the kde office suite - terminally incoherent had a great article recently on syncing gcalendar with kontact. http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2007/10/11/howto-two-way-sync-between-kontact-and-gcal/
@jambarama: First off, I'm glad to know that this isn't an issue with K-Mail only. With my low mail account (less than 10 e-mails) it works perfectly. However, even once I got my regular e-mail set up I too had problems. I was planning on testing it in some other clients, but I know I'll stick with POP3 access for now.
Thanks for mentioning the article. Although I've already seen it, I'm sure it will be useful to many people.
I made the experience that GMail with cached-imap becomes faster when the "all mail" folder is unsubscribed. I guess this is also true with regular imap.
I wrote an blog article about this topic: http://qaywsxedcrfv.blogspot.com/2007/11/gmail-imap-serious-show-stopper-for.html
@qaywsxedc: That's an interesting way to speed it up. I'll have to try that out in a bit. Thanks!
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