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Comment by Arnt | Hacker News Reader

What precisely is shitty and broken about gmail's IMAP implementation?

Gmail's IMAP implementation implements three RFCs I wrote; I haven't noticed anything wrong in those areas. Are my RFCs unusual or am I overlooking something?

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I'm curious if you've actually used an IMAP client witha Gmail account; if so, which one(s).

A sibling comment has already mentioned the folder/flags mixup issue, but while it sounds like one small feature, that one thing is so fundamentally broken that I really can't see how any user of Gmail IMAP would overlook it.

I get duplicate notifications for the same mail in INBOX and [Gmail]/All Mail and actions on one copy don't affect the other unless clients implement Gmail-specific hacks (which many/most do).

What RFCs are you referring to?

I used Thunderbird and am still using Airmail and they're working without issues for me. Faster, more responsive and better UI than any web crap.

I've never used Airmail, but the Thunderbird guys have put a lot of years[0] of work into specifically supporting Gmail's weirdness. It's still not as polished as something like macOS Mail (see commenter above)—you can still run into pitfalls syncing all folders/"labels" with special names, or moving emails from one folder/"label" to another, but it works ok.

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=40279...

I try using pine here and there. Every time I try, whenever I attempt sending a mail it locks my account for suspicious activity

Same thing happens with my phone (using the K9 email client) whenever I get or send email over a cellular connection.

I use Mail on OS X. I've never had any problems with Gmail. Folders work fine. I never use flags. Notifications work fine. When I delete a message, it's gone. Sometimes it takes a while for the deletion to propagate from one device to another, but I've never had a message survive deletion long term.

I also use Mail on OSX and you're right, it does have excellent Gmail support. This is definitely down to Apple putting in the work to support Gmail though, rather than Mail simply using IMAP as usual and Gmail working like any other IMAP server would.

The gp was talking about RFCs and the IMAP protocol implementation itself, so I was talking about the Gmail server at the protocol level, rather than user interface.

IMAP drafts have never worked and still doesn't work. You have to use local drafts as a workaround if you don’t want to end up with many drafts for a single mail in progress …

In addition, many Gmail features, especially security-related features, don't work with Mail.app.

> if you don’t want to end up with many drafts for a single mail in progress

That is absolutely a problem I've had with Mail and Gmail. No idea how I fixed it. Or whether it's been fixed at all. But for some reason, drafts turned up in searches, which made searching through my mail an incredibly painful experience. Search is fine now, though. Maybe I turned IMAP drafts off; I really don't know.

I use the windows Mail application and Gmail seems to work well in that.

I intended to ask about actual IMAP bugs. Things that go against the RFCs.

Showing the gmail labels as flags would be legal by the protocol (and have some disadvantages), showing them as mailboxes also legal (and have some other disadvantages), so I don't count that as a bug, it's merely a situation where one has to choose disadvantages.

The duplicate notifications are different; the way IMAP is designed the server cannot know which TCP connections originate from the same client. It can guess based on IP address and some other things, and it can know something based on RFC 2971, but 2971 also says explicitly that the server shouldn't do anyhting differently based on that. Which has been discussed in one of the IETF WGs, and the consensus was that the server isn't permitted to suppress probably superfluous notifications. If a client opens two connections, getting rid of duplicate notifications is the client's job.

www.rfc-editor.org/search/rfc_search_detail.php?author=gulbrandsen are my RFCs; I actually wrote most of those and gmail implements four of the IMAP-related ones I've written.

> I don't count that as a bug, it's merely a situation where one has to choose disadvantages.

There's no line in the IMAP spec. that very explicitly states "each mail MUST exist in exactly one folder", so you can certainly argue that Gmail technically follows the spec. but the only reason that line doesn't exist is because doing otherwise is so non-sensical as to not have been considered as a possibility. It does for example contain the following line, which Gmail does not follow: "permits manipulation of mailboxes (remote message folders) in a way that is functionally equivalent to local folders", but the fact that line is simply in the abstract and contains no MUST means one can argue it's not prescriptive.

There may be disadvantages to using flags instead of mailboxes, but equating their disadvantages is reverse hyperbole. If there was any equivalence, you wouldn't have every major client containing a rake of Gmail-specific code to work around the issue.

I don't see the phrase "MUST exist" anywhere in 3501? I see the word "exactly" in two sentences, neither of which appears to be the one you mean. Can you provide a reference?

I don't want to argue about the disadvantages of flags vs. mailboxes. It's a valid subject but I don't want a subject change.

That was stupid. Should not post while in a noisy environment.

Not the GP poster, but the most frustrating thing for me is that GMail labels are implemented as IMAP mailboxes instead of IMAP flags.

You might be more frustrated if they'd done it the other way; IMAP clients have a terrible habit of downloading the entire mailbox. If they were to expose all mail in one mailbox with flags as the usual case, users with such clients and a lot of mail would suffer.

I'm sure that's true, but I assume that many of these clients either wouldn't have been written this way or would have adapted by now if Gmail did things differently.

Possible. But until those changes are done and deployed, users on mobile connections would do gigabyte-sized downloads and Google's servers would suffer. If a lot of clients do SELECT * FROM *, the DBA will complain a lot until it stops, one way or another.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches; it must have been a nasty choice to make.

Sure, can't argue with that :)

> What precisely is shitty and broken about gmail's IMAP implementation?

Sent emails for one.

I’ve written various email integration components and have to make special safe-guards for Gmail-specific crap.

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