Google adds IMAP controls to Gmail and Google Apps

For those who have been using Gmail (and/or Google Apps) and have been putting up with Google's rather poor (or odd) implenation of the IMAP protocol, this will come as good news.

Google Labs have added a feature that enables you to fine-tune how IMAP is handled.

To enable this feature, go to Settings » Labs in Gmail and enable the Advanced IMAP Controls Lab. Read the official Google blog post for full details.

Some of the things you can now specify:

• Choose which labels (folders) to sync—this means you can finally disable the All Mail account to eliminate duplicate emails on your desktop computer!
• Turn off auto-expunge or trash messages when they're no longer visible through IMAP 
  • IMAP allows messages to be marked for deletion where the messages are still present but flagged to be deleted the next time the folder is "expunged"
   
• Actually remove a message when you delete it 
  • Up until now, Gmail doesn't ever actually delete messages but archives them in the All Mail folder. This might be okay on the webmail but it keeps hundreds (or thousands) of redundant messages to your computer
   

So, this is a very welcome addition and brings Gmail ever closer to being the perfect email system.

And, for those who have implemented a hack as in our article, How to set up Apple Mail for better Gmail IMAP support, you can now go back to accessing your emails normally. Just clear the IMAP Path Prefix field in your Mail account settings and synchronise the account.