Disclaimer:
I don’t work for Postbox, but I do appreciate their software and how it actually does what I want. This is why I am promoting it to friends and family alike.
This guide is written for Postbox 1.1.1, on Mac OS X (I’m on 10.6.2 at time of writing this), so I cannot guarantee success on the Windows version via the same steps, but all the settings in Gmail + preferences should be more or less identical.
When you get this set up, you should be able to archive messages just like in the web interface to keep on the Gmail servers, delete emails to the trash (or immediately) via Postbox, and get the most out of your Gmail-on-desktop experience. I hope this also helps anyone else who has trouble getting these things to work. I spent a good hour last night figuring it out.
If you read through this and try it out on a trial version, and you like what you see, you can save $10 on the purchase of Postbox by using a referral purchase page here (you will see a small message at the top confirming the $10 discount). Students with valid photo ID will get a 50% discount too.
So this application was mentioned by Lifehacker and I have since purchased it. I do not often purchase software (opting for the awesome freewares that are offered out there instead), but after using a trial version of this app, I instantly fell in love with the level of actual, real interoperability with Gmail IMAP. Having had no success with Mail or Thunderbird working properly with IMAP (i.e. archiving is wonky, as is expunging from the inbox), I tested this alternative out and found it to do exactly what I needed (mostly without any major configuration in the newer version).
If you’re looking for a feature list, please see their site for their marketing pitch.
I’m going to go over a quick guide to set up Postbox with Gmail, such that the archiving works along with trashing, inbox cleaning, and all that jazz. Currently, I have not found any other comprehensive guide that is proven to work that takes into account both the Gmail settings and the Postbox settings to ensure things play nice. Enjoy, and I hope this helps you if you’re having trouble.
Getting Postbox
First, you’ll need to go download a copy of Postbox (free trials are available for both Windows and Max OS X). Install by following the instructions (duh, straightforward, really). Go here for the download file (you’ll need to click the button at the top to get your OS-specific download, as their site automatically detects your operating system).
Preparing Gmail
If you have not done so already, you will need to enable IMAP for Gmail. Go to Gmail’s web interface (that is, go to your Gmail inbox via your Internet browser), and click on “Settings” in the top right corner.
First, set up advanced IMAP controls by enabling it via the Gmail Labs tabs. Head to the “Labs” settings tab, and enable “Advanced IMAP Controls” (about halfway down the list). Now, follow the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab to view your settings. Configure these settings to match mine.
Note: It is important but not essential that you select the “Do not automatically expunge messages” option. This just means that when you click “Delete” in Postbox (or any of your IMAP clients), automatically expunging will instantly and permanently delete that message, while my setting of not doing so will simply mark the files for deletion, but not actually delete them (until you do something like empty your trash bin). It is safer to tell Gmail to not automatically expunge items, in my opinion, as you can recover items accidentally deleted. Do be careful when using the auto-expunge option.
Gmail labels! IMAP has a way of organizing emails into “folders” via labels/tags. You’ll want to head to the “Labels” settings tab, still in Gmail’s web interface. Have yours set up to look like mine (I’m sure you can specify some others to show in IMAP without problems, but these are the main ones you’ll want to show for sure). For the purposes of setting up Gmail on Postbox (or any IMAP email client), you’re interested in the very last column of check boxes and not the “Show / Hide” toggles in the left column.
Gmail, now, should be primed and ready for Postbox goodness!
Note: Be sure to hide the “Sent Mail” label from IMAP (i.e. leave it unchecked). This prevents your sent emails (which are automatically labeled with the “Sent Mail” tag by Gmail’s servers) from showing up again as unread items in your inbox after sending from Postbox.
Configuring Postbox
Now, we switch back to Postbox. You will want to add a new mail account from “File > New > Mail Account”. Here’s the beauty of it: Postbox will pretty much have everything working great from this (as of version 1.1.1), as long as you enter your email address + password correctly. However, for older versions or people having trouble configuring their emails to work for whatever reason, I’ve taken some screenshots of my settings to help you out. Do enjoy.
- Adding the new mail account
- Server settings (note the “Move it to this folder: Trash” where you must click and select your email accounts’ Gmail trash folder; also note the “Clean up (“Expunge”) Inbox on Exit” setting, explained below)
- Copies settings (defaults, in 1.1.1, will do perfectly, but older versions may not use the folder settings as shown, so just click the drop down menus and select the folders from the Gmail accounts; note that you do not need to enable any sent email copying because Google’s email servers will automatically copy your sent emails to the “Sent Mail” folder for you)
- Junk settings (SpamAssassin is good; I set mine to move them to the “Spam” folder on Gmail, as well as auto-deleting junk mail older than thirty days, because of a WordPress file backup system I’m running—another post for another time!)
Carl’s Unnecessarily Detailed Notes
When setting the server settings, the default values will work for the most part, except the inbox clearing. I am someone who loves having a clean inbox, so I like archiving or deleting all my mail as soon as possible. Most mail clients fail to offer the ability to perform these actions properly with Gmail (because of Gmail’s philosophy of favoring archiving over deleting) since many clients don’t support true “archiving” functions to be analogous to Gmail’s “Archive” button. This is where a bit of cleverness comes into play, in the form of enabling the “Clean up (“Expunge”) Inbox on Exit” toggle. This essentially take
s all the emails you archived or deleted (they must be read) and removes the “Inbox” tag from them.
The problem with other clients is that they often don’t offer you the option of archiving or deleting things properly. Archiving on Gmail essentially marks the email as “All Mail” and removes the “Inbox” tag. Most clients can mark emails for deletion, but usually cannot handle archiving properly (usually, it’s the “Inbox” tag that is not removed, resulting in your emails collecting in the inbox until you go to the web interface to archive them manually). Enabling the expunge on exit will remove the “Inbox” tag from everything you’ve read through and moved, leading to no clutter in your web interface (when next you need to access Gmail from not your computer) while not having to auto-archive/delete everything you come by.
If your folders (like “Spam” or “All Mail”) don’t show up in the drop down menus when selecting where your copies of emails should go, you should right-click your account name in the main window and go to “Subscribe”. Here, scan through the list of possible folders from your Gmail and check off the ones you need to be able to see. Now you should wait awhile for the settings to update, and then you’ll be able to select those folders within the settings menus. If you followed my instructions for the Gmail labels prep, you won’t need to do this.