Here’s something troubling I’ve run into over the past 24 hours. I was moving someone over to the free Google Apps for your Domain setup, which provides free Gmail services @yourdomain.com. The client had an iPhone and wanted to move away from POP3 to an IMAP environment.
Sounds straightforward, right? So I thought, I had it set up in about an hour with email coming and going just fine, and no interruption of email. Great, but today, I get a call from the client saying that incoming mail messages are missing. Some don’t show up in Inbox, and some fail to even show up in the catch-all All Mail folder. However, these messages appear just fine in the Inbox folder… when viewing the webmail version. So, the problem is specific to the IMAP access for Gmail.
And, it appears I’m not alone in running into this problem. Google has yet to acknowledge it, of course. And, it’s not linked to a single email client… it has been confirmed on Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and I also believe Entourage as well… possibly Outlook too. This puts the problem right back at the service provider… Google.
And now, I look like a complete idiot setting up a client on an email service that looses messages… which is why he wanted to move from POP3 to IMAP in the first place. Great, now I’m out the time and money to move his to another service, and of course I have to do it at no additional charge to maintain my credibility.
My advice: feel free to try out Gmail IMAP on your own setup… just don’t put it on anyone else right now.