I really like the way Haiku manages mails with the default mail app. I tried it with 2 different mail accounts and it works fine.
I only got problems with syncing Google Mail (Imap).
It is known that Gmail only uses one big mail folder. The incoming mails are only labled with “Incoming” and even the “Trash” is only a label. At the end all mails are stored in the “folder” “all mails”.
I don’t like to use “all mails” as my incoming folder in the mail app because of too much messages in there.
But if I only choose the “Incoming” from Gmail as incoming folder in Haiku there is no sync with Gmail.
I can only watch my mails but moving or deleting them has only effect in Haiku. When I open Gmail in WebPositive I have to do the same again.
I would like to use the mail app with Google. Are there chances that it will work in the future? Of course I can use the Webmail, but I like mails apps. Trojitá works fine even with syncing the mails. I use it now but I would like to use the default app.
Default mail client is not exactly maintained at the moment, and I can confirm that it has glitches working with IMAP accounts, and also AFAIK it does not support HTML mails, so you won’t be able to make use of it anyway. I’d recommend using another mail client.
Hey, this is because gmail doesn’t use imap folders but rather an internal tagging system for their emails. There is no spec on this and nothing we can do about it afaik.
Where exactly are these claims coming from? it’s as maintained as the rest of the system, if something doesn’t work file a ticket…?
I’m using Haiku’s Mail & mail_daemon exclusively for my email (besides reading - and if can’t be help writing a mail ever few weeks - on my phone).
I must admit, that I pretty much use IMAP like POP3 20 years ago. Come to think of it, I do that under Haiku like GMail does…
I just get all the mail in one inbox folder and don’t move stuff in folders or something. I use queries and at most set a custom staatus attribute as sort of tag.
I have queries for “All unread”, and “Today” and “Today+Yesterday”.
I have query templates for “Since x days && subject” where I insert the number of days and the subject I’m looking for.
And so on.
When you close an email, you can set a custom status that you can query. I have “Later” (for things I’ll eventually deal with (or sometimes not ), “Userguide” (for things that impact the user guide), and some more…
Using Tracker’s type-ahead filtering helps too to limit query results even further.
Since I don’t use folders, but status attributes and queries, I never noticed that GMail’s IMAP under Haiku is ‘fake’.
That said, in the E-Mail preferences, you can create filters to sort incoming mails into folders.
Yes, that can be an issue if you’re managing your emails with folders from different apps/OS. Deleting a mail in Haiku does not delete it on the server, even if you have that checkmark ticked in the E-mail preferences, as I just found out.
Only un/read status is synced.
BTW, I have an ActivityMonitor replicant on the Desktop that shows network receive and sent. With that, I see if the mail_daemon is actually doing something. If I check for mail and don’t see data received, I know the damn mail_daemon is stuck again. To restart the daemon: Hold SHIFT while right-clicking the mailbox symbol in the Deskbar, then choose “Shutdown mail services” and it’s restarted.
That ist the main issue. At least deleting a mail should work. I can live with using one folder, but I have to delete my mails a second time on my phone. That makes the Haiku mail client unusable for me because I receive many mails every day.
Does the “delete mails on server” not work just for GMail, or for all mail providers?
I actually don’t care too much about deleting mails. As soon as a mail is marked as read, it drops off my radar and flushes down the wild river of my email stream…
There’s the “Mark as read” Tracker add-on to do that to a bunch of mails in one go without having to actually open them.
Actually I use Mail with IMAP accounts, and afaik, deleted mails are deleted on server. It’s not a Gmail account, it’s an Outlook.com one, in this case, I get all folders from the server and the mails appear inside the proper folder (because the rules are set on the server side). So as @extrowerk pointed out, the issue must be on Gmail’s side.
The only PITA is the lack of HTML email support. Other than that, I’m fine with Mail. Trojita, while being IMAP, only allows one single account, thus doesn’t work for me.
I have to try with my new provider to verify with other servers, though I haven’t completed yet the setup after the switch. will do “shortly”
Thanks for the clarification.
I don’t mind not being able to send HTML mails. Does loads for my karma.
And the HTML mails I receive have the HTML version as attachment that opens in half a second in Web+. Good enough for me.
I’ll check if the html version as attachment is available in the ones I get. Actually I don’t care about sending HTML, but mail software decided now that HTML is the default mode to send/receive emails, so I get only HTML emails, no plain text as back in the days…
And when you see other people use email software… I understand why
I really know nothing about this - use gmail rarely, and have never really successfully used Haiku email - but I do know something about IMAP and was mighty curious about this. Surfing around for info, I found an explanation of how to make your gmail “labels” accessible as IMAP folders: https://ladedu.com/how-to-configure-gmail-imap-folders-available-for-access-in-email-programs/
I don’t know if that’s the issue here, but at least it adds up. An IMAP client won’t care how the folders are implemented, that’s just server side data store business, but a mail application isn’t required to present the same organization to both IMAP and non-IMAP interfaces.
The only screwy thing I’ve noticed with gmail IMAP is related to message deletion. To delete a message, the application sets a \Deleted flag on message. The message is otherwise unaffected and stays there in the folder, until the application sends an EXPUNGE or CLOSE command. The gmail server is a little more eager to delete that email. It will remain there for the clients with the folder already open, but a new folder access will find that it disappeared without any EXPUNGE or CLOSE.
will do “shortly” 
