GmailIsNotIMAP

What is special about Gmail?

Gmail is an excellent web-based tool for handling email (at least from this author's point of view =)).

IMAP (or Internet Message Access Protocol) is a technology that lets you access your email that is stored on remote email servers.

MIST uses IMAP to connect to your email server and download messages to be imported into TntConnect. Conveniently, Gmail does support IMAP, but because most Gmail users use Gmail's website to access their email, there can be some unexpected side effects when using MIST. These are avoidable, but it is important to realize that Gmail is not the same as IMAP.

The most important thing to remember is this: When you label a conversation in Gmail, it appears that Gmail labels the entire conversation. However, Gmail only actually labels the conversation UP TO THAT POINT. This is important to understand because of a scenario like this:

1. A contact emails you
2. As a faithful MIST user, you label the conversation with tnt
3. You then reply to the email

In the case above, if you look in "Sent" in Gmail, you'll see your reply and it will appear as though it were labeled with "tnt". However, MIST would only see the original donor's email! This is because the label only applies to all emails UP TO when you label it.

Recommended method for using MIST with Gmail

Thankfully, getting around this potentially confusing problem is not too difficult. Here is how to do it:

1. In Gmail, set up another label called "tnt-download".
2. In MIST, set the Email Folder to be called "tnt-download".
3. Now, before you use MIST to download your email at any time:
   1. Open up your Gmail "tnt" folder.
   2. Select all the messages in that folder (there's a drop-down box that lets you do that.)
   3. Click "Move to" and select "tnt-download".
   4. Use MIST to import your email.
   5. Afterwards, you can select all the messages in "tnt-download" and remove that label.

This gets around the problem above because it guarantees that all emails in "tntmpd-download" are labeled "up to the minute".

You can then go about using your original "tntmpd" label until you're ready to use MIST again.

Links

For more details, read the following

• Getting started with IMAP for Gmail (A good overview)
• Enabling IMAP (Important for using MIST)
• Why aren't my messages threaded? (Important for understanding how Gmail will affect MIST)