I don't know about the technical details but I have tried GMail's IMAP and
it seems to work fine with mainstream clients--I've tested Microsoft Office
Outlook (2003 and 2007), Mozilla Thunderbird, Cyrus Daboo's Mulberry (which
is my preferred client), and Pegasus Mail. Of these I know for certain that
Mulberry and Pegasus Mail haven't been rigged to work with GMail. Others
report GMail working fine with the fetchmail/getmail + mutt/pine/alpine
combinations often used on UNIX clones.

Do my postings contain extra or missing carriage returns?

Have you tried their IMAPS on port 993?

I have included the header of the message you have sent to 9fans as seen by
Mulberry.

Something about upas: someone on the list said their upas configured to use
GMail downloaded _all_ message headers in one go. That's bad behavior,
similar to MSO Outlook and Thunderbird, and bound to cause long delays on
slower and less reliable connections or with large mailboxes (GMail's
custom "labels" amount to mailboxes in IMAP and they can get pretty large,
my 9fans archive contains over 5500 messages now). Mulberry fetches only
enough message headers to fill its current view. When you change the view
it fetches the required headers.

--On Friday, November 21, 2008 12:21 PM -0500 erik quanstrom
<quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:

> there definately is a bug in gmail's imap
>
> 3 uid fetch 29 (rfc822.size)<cr>
> * 29 FETCH (UID 29 RFC822.SIZE 1234)<cr>
> 3 OK Success<cr>
> 3 uid fetch 29 (body[])<cr>
> * 29 FETCH (UID 29 BODY[] {1246}<cr>
> [...]
>
> oops.  the obvious bug, that the body of the email
> is 1246 - 1234 lines long and they forgot to count
> the <cr>s added by the protocol doesn't check
> because the body is 7 lines long.  neither is the
> header 12 lines long.
>
> - erik
>
>