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Their imap gateway is nonstandard to say the least. The labels vs folders thing is already a mess, but it also speaks a protocol that is just different enough from regular imap that most clients (e.g. thunderbird) have a different implementation with quirks for google-imap.

Using those clients is sub-standard with google's imap implementation, and switching between them is more painful due to how each one handles googles "labels not folders" quirk

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This is true, I'm well aware of this, but at least there's still a choice.

Unfortunately nothing is truly stopping Google to pull a Slack move and close the gateways... unless the amount of IMAP/SMTP users are significantly higher, than we know, or that those users are tech influencers Google don't dare to loose.

I would wager that G Suite users will keep IMAP/SMTP alive via Outlook and other enterprise deployments.

It's better than nothing, though. It is almost bearable if you ignore the "All Mail" folder.

The problem is that it might as well disappear at any time. It is already disabled by default for new accounts, and you need to change 2 different settings to enable it.

It always was, nearly since the beginning. I remember needing to turn it on around 2007.

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