KGiMAP

A not so beautiful Allston morning turned out to be a rather useful one with the slashdot post [ Free IMAP On Gmail]. I checked my gmail settings and (apprently I am among the fortunate ones here) I saw the "Enable IMAP" setting there. Wee...

Fired up Kmail, added a new account for Google as a disconnected IMAP. And on my way to sync ... I was curious how the labels were going to be handled, I have about 15 of them based on which mailing list or which bugzilla an email is from (I have mentioned this before - I prefer organization over search). It was nice to see the labels getting downloaded as imap folders. And there is a special folder [Gmail] which contains the regular gmail folders - All mail, Starred, Trash, Spam, Sent Mail. Thats when it struck me!

All the emails are going to be duplicated or triplicated or could have even more copies. Labels are not disjoint, so there are mails in my Inbox that are also in beagle-bugs and of course all mail ever is also in All Mail. To add to the trouble, deleting an email locally is going to archive the email (basically, it removes the Inbox label from the email) and not delete it. The huge amount of mails in the Spam folder is not healthy for my hard disk space. The huge amount of emails my beagle-bugzilla filter sends out to Trash is similarly bad.

As of now I resolved the situation by asking all my filters (I have one filter for each label) to archive the email ( Skip the inbox) and then apply the label. I asked KMail to not subscribe to any of the [Gmail] folders. And I created a Gmail label(IMAP folder on KMail) Totrash which I marked as my Trash folder in KMail (for the GMail account). Now whenever I delete a Gmail email from KMail, it will go to Totrash which I can empty periodically from the web-interface. What a kludge! I wish there was a rule to empty folders or a filter move emails from Totrash to Trash!