This past week I felt a little like a kid who got a pony for Christmas…and a firetruck. First comes the new Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, and next comes Gmail with IMAP. Using Gmail as an uber-account for all my mail accounts, I might be able to defrazzle my inbox at last. Using Apple’s Mail 3.0 coupled with the new iCal, I was hoping to rock some killer GTD on my Mac.
Now comes today. My pony just got run over by my firetruck. It turns out that Gmail IMAP is a little funky. Initially it was terribly slow to download and retrieve messages. Next comes the difficulty of mapping Apple Mail mailboxes to Gmail’s schema of labels, (explained nicely by Mitch Wagner.) I was using the very cool GTDGmail Firefox extension until the Evil Day Job from Hell broke web access to Gmail, meaning that I had many messages with multiple tags. Mail 3.0 only lets you put one message into one folder, meaning that messages with more than one tag got duplicated.
What I’m left with is a fairly unhappy snarl of mismatched folders on the Mail 3.0 side and labels on the Gmail side. I’m also getting a lot of dialog boxes alerting me that the message on the server is different from the message on the local machine, and asking me which I want to keep? Unfortunately these warnings don’t give a clue as to the differences. What seems to work here is to click the “keep local” version (presuming this is the message that you’ve just updated or added a To-Do to), sync the mailboxes and when the warning comes around again, as it will, click the “get server” button. Kind of a round-about way to do things.
This isn’t to say that Gmail IMAP completely blows over Apple Mail. In fact there are some nifty things–Mail Notes get stored on the Gmail server with a special Apple Mail To-Dos label, and a stern warning not to delete the message. It just means that I’m in for a little more twiddling than I had hoped.