Last week was a bit of a daze spent uploading years and years of email history to Gmail now that IMAP has been enabled. After a few days playing I have to report that IMAP has some pros and cons – it’s refreshing not to worry about backing up Outlook profiles (and a little worrying relying on the Googleplex but therein lies the rub with SaaS). And now for some features that make it slightly less than perfect for me;

  •  It’s slow – I run WiFi everywhere and WiFi over 256k or thereabouts DSL at home and the slowdown refreshing Outlook under IMAP is very noticeable
  • I have several email addresses – they’re all set up in Gmail and I was in the habit of just replying to incoming mail through the Gmail window. In this instance Gmail very nicely sends from the same mail address as the one the mail was received at – unfortunately the same functionality doesn’t extend to IMAP (shame)

So… some stuff that would make it perfect….

  • Speed it up (I don’t care how – just do it)
  • Truly enable multiple email accounts (and lose the “sent from x@google.com on behalf of x@y.z” append when sending for other accounts – it just looks bad)
  • Enable multiple signatures with multiple email accounts and allow some smart option setting for this
  • Roll Google cal nicely into gmail so it feels like an Outlook killer
  • Let me sync my google cal (along with IMAP) to my PDA

Still.. given that people spend a grand or so on MS office – the functionality we have for free now with Google is pretty good I guess

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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