We use Gmail and it’s IMAP functionality for our emails and we also recommend it to our smaller clients who don’t use or have a need for an enterprise mail solution. Why? Because Gmail rocks.

Along with everyone else who uses IMAP we’ve tried just about every client out there in search of the perfect solution.

It’s an extremely frustrating process to work through the forum, tutorials and discussions of those who have tried before and peice together their guides in order to avoid encountering the nuances of each client that they discovered.

Before getting to the things about WLM that we love here’s why we just can’t use Thunderbird or Outlook:

Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a popular choice due to it being easy to setup, supporting multiple accounts and the number of plugins available.

The real fun begins when you want to style your emails and can’t choose a proper font size. Even in version 3… All you can do is pick small, medium and large rather than a point size which is incredibly annoying if you have a specific format you like to use for your emails.

Even more annoying is that although you can select the fonts to use for writing and replying to emails in the options, Thunderbird is quirky and often reverts back to it’s default font when you compose a new mail.

You might think compared to some IMAP clients that this is insignificant compared to their much bigger problems but just wait until you’ve had to restyle your 10th email by 9.10am on a Monday morning.

Outlook 2007

Outlook 2007 is pretty slow and clunky and it’s noticeable if you switch from another client which you’re used to being efficient. The biggest irritation though is that you cannot specify where deleted mail should go and so they automatically moved into your Gmail deleted items rather than the local Outlook folder.

This means if you just hit the delete key, which everyone does, the mail is moved to your local deleted items folder and the ‘inbox’ or other label is removed from the mail. It still exists in your ‘All mail’ folder in gmail but you can only see a list of your deleted emails on the machine you were at when you deleted them. Move to a new machine to do some work and you’ve no idea which of the emails in your ‘All Mail’ folder were deleted items.

You can get around this by dragging an email you are finished with into a Gmail folder rather than hitting the delete key or programming a series of macros and assinging them to a key on the keyboard but who could be bothered with either? You also can’t assign it to the delete key as it’s function is pre defined.

Outlook 2010 actually solves this problem and it does allow you to specify the path for your deleted mail including using a remote Gmail folder.

The problem which it still has though is that if you have multiple Gmail accounts set up you cannot drag mail from one account to the other and have to ‘forward’ an email from one address to another.

If you only use a single Gmail account in Outlook and the deleted mail path problem has annoyed you forever then download Outlook 2010 and you can breathe a sigh of releif.

Windows Live Mail

Windows live mail is free and can be downloaded here.

WLM doesn’t have the font problems which Thunderbird has and lets you choose your font, font style, colour and size just like in Outlook.

Each account’s properties panel has an IMAP tab allowing you to set the root folder path and let you choose the folders you want to use for deleted items, sent mail etc

You can set up multiple Gmail IMAP accounts and drag emails between the accounts from and to any folders you like. This is great if you have more than 1 email address you attend to.

It’s also very useful if you have a central email address that more than 1 person monitors such as a general ‘enquiries’ email account. Multiple people can monitor that inbox and just drag an item into their personal account when they come to deal with an enquiry.

WLM used to be pretty slow once you added multiple IMAP accounts due to the number of folders it had to synchronise but Google Labs released the Advanced IMAP Controls feature which lets you decide which IMAP folders even appear in your local client. This means you can choose not to sync big folders like the All Mail folder on your local machine making the client much faster. It’s also prevents the nasty timeouts and login warnings which used to happen a lot in WLM.

You can view your mailboxes by conversation if you like the threaded email view and whilst the interface layout isn’t as flexible as larger programmes such as Outlook there’s still enough options that you can create a working environment that you are familiar with such as choosing where the preview pane should be displayed if it all and how the message lists appear.

If it’s been a while since you tried WLM and you previously got frustrated at time outs then give it another try now that Advance IMAP controls are available and be amazed how nicely it runs.

You can view detailed instructions here on how to setup WLM to work with Gmail using IMAP including multiple accounts, signatures and more.

What client do you use for IMAP? What quirks make Monday mornings painful?