Author Topic: Opera M2 + Gmail + IMAP = not recommended (Read 17329 times)

jgpaiva · « **on:** February 04, 2008, 02:09 PM »

Ok, so by this point everyone already knows that opera is the best browser in the world. Then, you also know that M2 is the best email client in the world. And that Gmail is the best email provider in the world.

The problem arises when you combine them.

Gmail uses a tag approach for email. And then, they map this to folders. Then, opera downloads those and considers it's stuff in different folders, and from then on, the whole thing becomes stupid.

Imagine you have a bunch of gmail filters in place. When I receive an email from DC, it comes into my inbox, and gets tagged "donationcoder". (also don't forget that all mails in gmail are under the "all mail" tag).
So... I receive an email from DC, and opera informs me that i have 3 new emails, ALL EXACTLY THE SAME, but in different folders.

Then i find that opera has a "ignore imap folders" option! I set it to ignore all but the "all mail" folder, and life is good... Until i receive the next email, repeated 3 times again. That happens because opera somehow forgot about that "ignore" setting and isn't ignoring any of the folders again.

So now i have a few options:

I try to figure out why it is ignoring the settings (maybe someone here knows)
I go back to POP (and risk it losing some mails) (and redownload all my email! )
I configure GMail so that it doesn't have any labels and sends every mail directly to the all mail tag.
9mm

What do you think?

CGA · « **Reply #1 on:** February 04, 2008, 03:18 PM »

From what i've heard it's actually Gmail that doesn't support unsubscribing from selective folders (yet). I personally gave up on Opera+IMAP long time ago and went back to POP. I've tested Thunderbird and IMAP for a while but the problem was the same, you get all your IMAP folders downloaded.

jgpaiva · « **Reply #2 on:** February 04, 2008, 03:19 PM »

Oh... Thanks a lot for the explanation, CGA! That makes opera raize in my consideration almost to the level it was before this mess

iphigenie · « **Reply #3 on:** February 05, 2008, 03:15 AM »

I use opera+imap and its better than almost any other client I tried (2 exceptions are better on some aspects) - so I am curious as to what the problem is.

I just open the imap folder list and tick imap folders I want to monitor and it ignores all others.

We must be talking about different things

jgpaiva · « **Reply #4 on:** February 05, 2008, 04:32 AM »

Do you use opera's IMAP with gmail, iphigenie?

If not, then that confirms it's gmail's fault

iphigenie · « **Reply #5 on:** February 05, 2008, 10:00 AM »

I was just saying that in all my tests with M2 if i went to "imap folders" and specifically only left one or two ticked, I only got email from these folders. Ever.

I have used this with several imap servers and never had a problem.

So it is possible it is gmail - i might create a gmail account just to test

jgpaiva · « **Reply #6 on:** February 05, 2008, 10:31 AM »

And my odisey continues.
I tried to download all my email through POP, and wasn't well succeeded. It downloaded all emails up to 08/2007 and then just said it had no more mails to download.

So... I started again. I reconfigured gmail so that it now archives all email directly, and removed all the labels. Now i'm downloading it all again through IMAP. Let's hope it goes ok now!

nontroppo · « **Reply #7 on:** February 05, 2008, 10:35 AM »

The problem with IMAP folders is due to GMail, according to the M2 dev at Opera...

Note that IMAP support in 9.5 is much improved over 9.25 overall.

jgpaiva · « **Reply #8 on:** February 05, 2008, 11:06 AM »

The problem with IMAP folders is due to GMail, according to the M2 dev at Opera...
-nontroppo (February 05, 2008, 10:35 AM)

Glad to know that, nontroppo! Thanks

Note that IMAP support in 9.5 is much improved over 9.25 overall.
-nontroppo (February 05, 2008, 10:35 AM)

Yep, that's what i'm using

PS: the email download is going... Slowly but going. Yay! \o/

iphigenie · « **Reply #9 on:** February 05, 2008, 01:36 PM »

Actually I have a bug in 9.5 which leaves phantom empty emails/rss entries which cannot be deleted.

And I thought 9.25 was doing really well on imap, didnt notice improvements - I wish they listed somewhere what these improvements are

nontroppo · « **Reply #10 on:** February 05, 2008, 01:45 PM »

Yes, ghost mails are a hard-to-track down bug in 9.5.

Changes in IMAP?

Rachid Finge: How would you rate Opera’s current IMAP implementation in comparison to those of your main competitors? I especially mean Thunderbird, which seems industry leader when it comes to IMAP protocol support. What kind of rework are you planning when it comes to IMAP?

and

Graste: What improvements will the new IMAP backend bring in Kestrel and Peregrine? Will the IMAP standards support be similar complete as in clients like Mulberry?

A: As Graste mentioned, Kestrel contains a rewritten IMAP backend, based strictly on the IMAP standard, with (improved) support for features such as nested folders, keywording and working offline.

I wouldn’t exactly call Thunderbird the industry leader when it comes to IMAP support - Mulberry takes that one hands down. However, I don’t think we’ll easily be able to support the amount of IMAP extensions that Mulberry supports: Mulberry is a client that’s specifically designed around the IMAP protocol, while M2 is a client with its own design that supports IMAP as one of the possible protocols for the messages it stores. In other words, our goal is not to support as many features and extensions of IMAP as possible, but to make M2’s way of handling messages work seamlessly with as many IMAP servers as possible. We take a similar approach to Thunderbird in that respect.

http://operawatch.co...ory/news/mail-client

jgpaiva · « **Reply #11 on:** February 05, 2008, 05:42 PM »

Ok.. Just reporting that my trouble is now sorted out, i configured gmail as mentioned above and opera's IMAP has just finished the full sync.

I'm an happy camper again!

iphigenie · « **Reply #12 on:** February 06, 2008, 05:38 AM »

I really like the way m2 allows me to work with email quickly without having to move email in tons of folders.

If they added some form of tagging it'd be close to perfect for my home use

allen · « **Reply #13 on:** February 08, 2008, 03:12 PM »

So everything going ok? Back when gmail first offered IMAP, I jumped for joy -- but was quickly disappointed when, while waiting for Opera to sync, gmail blocked access to my account. . . how dare I use the new IMAP functionality! New service, I suppose they needed time to tweak their malicious use sniffers. . . I'll let you be the canary, I'm afraid to try gmail/opera again. (This is actually my second gmail account, my first was magically closed/locked out and they refused to re-activate it :/) -- early beta.

How many messages are you synchronizing? And are you downloading bodies or no?

jgpaiva · « **Reply #14 on:** February 08, 2008, 04:10 PM »

Yep, everything ok.

I have 10k emails (i think it's something around that) which represent 500mb, i think.
I'm not synchronizing buddies (or you meant a completelly different thing and i misunderstood you completelly?

)

It takes a bit more time to check the mail (nothing noticieable, i'm just being picky), and it has a "synchonize" when you start opera which takes about 3 seconds.
There are only 2 important problems:

It took a whole afternoon to sync it all (but my wireless router has been acting really stupid, this it might be related).
And, some spam passed though the filter (3 emails) in that first day. Hasn't happened ever since (i already have the normal 100 spam emails on gmail's spam box). I'm just saying this because i'm not sure if the fact i created that "send all emails to archive" gmail filter might or might not have affected gmail's spam filter.

Oh, also:
Opera doesn't identify gmail's "sent" filter as a filter, thus, all emails i send get repeated in opera's inbox (because they are in 2 folders in gmail). This isn't anoying to me because they don't show up as unread. Also, this problem might be caused by a misconfiguration on my side, because opera has a "folder for sent emails" setting which i still haven't figured out how to set to [gmail]/sent see followup

scancode · « **Reply #15 on:** February 08, 2008, 04:18 PM »

I'd say 9mm, but it's up to you. Personally, I use no tags, and Windows Live Mail

jgpaiva · « **Reply #16 on:** February 08, 2008, 04:24 PM »

Ok, now i really recommend it!

I was able to set the "[gmail]/sent" folder as the sent folder for opera, and now all is good. No more repeated emails, and all emails are correctly labled as sent when they are sent by me, as opposed to POP, where i did get the emails i sent though the web interface in opera, but they weren't labeled as "sent".

Now let's just wait for some spam to arrive to see if it gets in opera's spam box or in the inbox. (unfortunatelly, i think it'll appear in the inbox, as there's no option in opera to set the IMAP spam folder).

allen · « **Reply #17 on:** February 08, 2008, 08:14 PM »

Encouraged by your experience, I went ahead and gave Opera/Imap another whirl. Having used gmail since its early Beta, I've become quite accustomed to (and fond of) its simpler approach. While I used to use The Bat! and painstakingly organize my mail into an abyss of folders, I've found the bigger the collection of mail the more a lack of organization (with emphasis on an efficient search system) pays off. The ability to use gmail and M2 together with synchronisity has always been a bit of a dream -- and it looks like, for the most part, that's now a reality.

So far things are looking good. My biggest problem right now is a bit opposite yours -- M2's spam filter is hitting false positives like crazy -- even with my correcting it, it's still tagging a *lot* of good mail as spam. I emptied my spam folder to eliminate actual spam, so it's more a nuissance than a problem -- just marking a lot of mail as not spam. Hopefully, at some point, the filter will catch on.

I'm optimistic; I've used M2 previously--once downloaded my entire gmail message base via pop 3 and the spam filter, once trained worked amazingly -- but I've never seen so much false positive action in my life. It'd bizarre. I'd sort of hoped you had the same problem, perhaps indicative of an imap bug or something. I must just have bad luck. The messages that are being flagged really don't seem particularly suspicious to me . . . well formed, literate correspondence with web development clients and the occasional mailing list message (Which is also being appropriately detected as mailing list messages...). I'm a bit baffled. Might have to try to figure out how to reset the spam filter.

nontroppo · « **Reply #18 on:** February 09, 2008, 04:00 AM »

-- but I've never seen so much false positive action in my life.

As I've been suffering from ghost mails in the 9.5beta, I thought I'd hose my mail folder and start again, using IMAP for two (non-gmail) servers. Almost all my mail ended up in spam. Opera has a very questionable policy, which will tag spam from known contacts. They do this because viruses can propagate, and contacts email addresses can be compromised etc. But this increases the quantity of false positives, which for me is a cardinal sin, false negatives are much less destructive... I've submitted bugs on that, and also the fact it can flag replies to mail *I* sent (you can analyse headers to know it is a reply). Allen did you use 9.2x or 9.5beta?

jgpaiva · « **Reply #19 on:** February 09, 2008, 04:40 AM »

About spam: while i was downloading the email through imap, i also got the same problem.
I suppose that's the spam filter "learning".
The solution is simple: go to gmail and clean the spam folder. Then, go to opera, select all of the emails on the spam folder and select "not spam".
After i did that, no more non-spam emails got in the spam folder. (and i've already received a few spam emails that did get in there.

nontroppo: yep, i also noticed that most of my emails that got in the spam folder were chain-letters and alike.

One thing i love about this new config is that i've created a hotkey to toggle "spam state" of messages. It's VERY useful, and really fast!
Of course, i found out how to create it through nontropppo's great opera wiki!

allen · « **Reply #20 on:** February 09, 2008, 06:45 AM »

I'm using 9.5 beta (build 9770) -- or, I was yesterday. My issue of the day is the fact that I can't use Opera . . . it goes so far into the synchronization process and then crashes, every time. *sigh*

jgpaiva · « **Reply #21 on:** February 09, 2008, 07:34 AM »

I'm sorry to know that, allen

iphigenie · « **Reply #22 on:** February 09, 2008, 08:02 AM »

I had that with the beta, but the truth was that it was going further while appearing crashed, and eventually would make it to the end after a dozen or so attempts

Although for me it wouldnt crash, just totally freeze - and once i decided to let it frozen for a while it eventually came out of it with all my mail imported. I had been killing it thinking it frozen but actually it was just struggling with the stuff

allen · « **Reply #23 on:** February 09, 2008, 08:04 AM »

It was "frozen" all night last night -- successfully. The "problem" is it doesn't want to download the message bodies when checking, as it works ok if I don't. But the whole point of this exercise was/is to have a local searchable store of my e-mail. Maybe if I kick it a few times . . .

iphigenie · « **Reply #24 on:** February 09, 2008, 08:06 AM »

thats totally different