Like Microsoft, or any other business, Google is going to move forward with decisions that make good business sense to them. Google has never proclaimed themselves to be a FOSS company and they don’t pretend to be. Rather, they understand, that for the types of products they intend to create, it makes great business (and technological) sense to leverage open source technologies and open standards. In some cases it even makes sense to contribute back to these projects or open source your own. However, like most companies that leverage open source technologies to drive their products (busybox sqlite mysql anyone?) much of that gets wrapped up in proprietary code under different licenses (and often GPLd versions too but it’s difficult to track). 

GMail, like any other product on the market, has strengths and weaknesses. Google has invested in parts of the product that drive their product strategy forward, and create value for the majority of their user base. Customers are free to choose the solution(s) that best fit their needs and ideology. While Google may eventually get around to working on their IMAP support, it may not be a supporting interest to their long term vision for GMail. It is their obligation to their shareholders to make business decisions that reflect these goals.

As for myself, GMail works for me in most cases. That’s not to say that I don’t have all kinds of implementations that I deploy for my customers (Windows+Exchange, FreeBSD+Qmail, Ubuntu+Courier, etc) but when it comes to my personal mail needs it works great – not to mention that it syncs contacts, calendar, and mail to my phone, and that Google Docs also satisfies my Office needs, and that Google Voice let’s me do some badass voicemail tricks, and that my tasks are available everywhere, and Google reader to find this blog, etc. 

A final thought on privacy. I’m torn. I’m a ridiculous privacy advocate. But I’m also a huge fan of simplicity and convenience. I find Google’s privacy policies borderline insulting. However, I can’t help myself from seeing a certain truth to things. Despite Google’s crap privacy policy, I don’t feel a concern for my personal privacy – just a concern for general privacy on principle. The fact is, I don’t really have a cause for concern. I’m not a criminal, I’m a nerd. I don’t have time to even consider hacking. I can’t think of a single thing I have going on that would make me a target for investigation. After all, privacy breaches are typically defined by some sort of investigation yeah? I would say, that in general a breach of my privacy (in the context of GMail) could only occur through the course of some forensic inquiry. Therefore, Google’s strikingly calloused response to privacy concerns, while not something I would advocate saying out loud to your customers, isn’t entirely off. If you don’t do stuff that would put you under scrutiny then your personal privacy shouldn’t be a problem. 

Gmail IMAP Claws Mail on Maemo and Gmail IMAP on Seamonkey are working.

Your post — and your work — miss the point entirely. Nobody cares how email works, they just want it to work.

Gmail (and most other webmail applications) makes everything else obsolete. I can’t imagine why Evolution is even shipped with Gnome anymore.

Web-based email clients are the standard.

-Anon

I needed an IMAP server that worked well with virtual domains (we have a single email server that provides email for a number of clients and domains), had database support, and was actively developed. I use a combination of Courier-IMAP, MySQL, Postfix, and Horde/IMP. A custom PHP based front-end manages email accounts. I adopted Courier IMAP in 2003, and at the time, it seemed like the only choice for what I needed to do. I’ve experienced some problems with it (mainly with Outlook 2003 — I’m not sure whether to blame Courier IMAP or Microsoft, experience would tend towards the latter), but on the whole, it’s been stable and reliable.

Cyrus doesn’t seem to have released a stable version of their code in 4+ years. I’m hesitant to go with the 2.3.x tree on a production server.

Dovecot is fairly new; is it ready and stable enough for production use?

It’s kinda frustrating if your client code becomes a mess full of hacks just to support Courier too. The funny thing is that you see the tendency of introducing hacks and comments full of swear words in almost each E-mail client as soon as they want to make it it working with Courier.

Luckily the one (silly) reason why people have been picking Courier is available in Dovecot too: Maildir. It’s not that Maildir is such a extremely great standard. Although it sure is a good standard (just not great), if you replace the ‘:’ in the filenames with ‘!’ (else it wont even work on Windows).

Normally I wouldn’t have that much of an opinion about a software like Courier. I mean, it’s free software and even if it wouldn’t have been free software … if the guy wants to write crap, let him write crap. Right? The problem is that it’s a popular server (for some bizarre reason, it managed to get popular – I can’t grasp why, though -) and that this means that each and every client developer needs to cope with the quirks.

And that’s not good, not good at all.

Apan: yep and yep

Jonathan: CONDSTORE, QRESYNC, SORT, THREAD, COMPRESS, STARTTLS (with a TLS library that does compression – combining COMPRESS and STARTTLS is not required for me, because that makes no sense indeed -), NOTIFY, UIDPLUS, …

The SSL wrapper mode only is a bit crazy too…