As good as Gmail is at filtering spam. It would be nice if it would stop putting all emails sent from my web form into the spam folder. As you have probably guessed, enquiries are not actioned until I, by chance, browse my spam folder.

Setting filters and classifying emails as “not spam” makes no difference.

The only solution is to set the from address to be something like “contactform@mysite.com” and adding the email address as a contact. Gmail recognises it as a friend and doesn’t place it in your spam folder. (Remember to include the senders proper email in the body. :) )

Scenario
My email client is Thunderbird. It has been for several years. So that’s several years’ worth of emails, attachments, filters, junk training and plug-ins. The set up is exactly how I would like it to be, well…almost. A feature I really would like to be a touch less painful is being able to share my emails between machines. Up until now I have gotten around this problem by sharing my profile folder, this works ok as long as you remember to close the client on all machines, otherwise you get the dreaded lock file error message. This is where IMAP comes in.

What is IMAP?
Why bother when Google explain it so well.

The Issue
Like I said earlier, I have many emails, attachments, filters which I don’t want to lose. In addition to this, GMAIL has the ability to cope with all that Thunderbird offers. The plan then was to transfer all my emails to GMAIL and set up filters and labels to ultimately end up with that I have in Thunderbird replicated in GMAIL. The major task being copying thousands of emails from a Thunderbird POP account to a GMAIL IMAP account.

Below is an explanation of what I had to do to move from POP to IMAP.

1. Firstly, Enable IMAP!
For some reason, IMAP still hasn’t been enabled in my account. To enable IMAP you need to switch your default language to “English (US)”. This will display the “Enable/Disable” IMAP option AND automatically enable it for you.

2. Setting up IMAP in Thunderbird alongside your existing POP account.
Again, just follow this tutorial. (Other clients)

I now have IMAP enabled in my Gmail account and have set up the account in Thunderbird.

You will notice some new folders under a folder called [GMAIL]. These are standard folders that exist in your Gmail account.

3. Copying emails from POP to IMAP
By simply dragging and dropping the folders from the POP account to the newly created IMAP account creates a label in Gmail AND uploads all emails for you. It is really that simple. It can take a while as it also uploads all attachments.

4. Set up filters
This, I decided, to do on a case by case basis. As a new email arrives, set up the new filter in GMAIL. Tedious, if not annoying, but I want to transfer control over to GMAIL.

… and there you have it. Easy innit!

My POP account remains active as I use it to download all my emails which I now use as a backup.

Here are some hacks and tools that improve how IMAP and Gmail behaves.

Trash can
As it stands, when you delete an email, it will end up in your LOCAL trash can and not in Gmail. To make all deleted emails end up in Gmail’s trash can you will need to modify user.js. There is a way of doing this by adding a new string within config but I could not get this to work whereas this tutorial worked fine.

Folder Labels
If you upload a folder which has subfolders, Gmail creates a label separated with slashes.
e.g. if you upload a folder called “Friends” which contains a sub-folder called “Bob” then all emails in “Bob” are labeled as “Friends/Bob”. So as you can imagine, folders with long names make the labels pretty much unreadable. Fortunately, there are two ways around this:

Folders4Gmail is a Greasemonkey scripts that takes the nested label structures and turns it into a clickable tree.
Better Gmail is a Firefox add-on that does the same, as well as many other mods. Well worth a look.

Other useful resources:
lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/ turn-thunderbird-into-the-ultimate-gmail-imap-client

http://userstyles.org/styles/search/gmail

http://blog.persistent.info/2005/12/greasemonkey-christmas.html

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1320 (Gmail Manager)

http://lifehacker.com/photogallery/top-10-unofficial-gmail-apps/

Update - I was asked about which PHP scripts I use to send email via Google’s SMTP server. The most popular (or well known) one is PHPMailer, problem is that it doesn’t support TLS authentication. SwiftMailer does all that PHPMailer does with the added benefit of sending emails through Google.

You may already know that you can send emails from web forms using Google Applications SMTP server, which is really handy if you have your own VPS as a way of preserving resources such as memory and disk space when installing your own mail server and spam filtering software.

A minor problem with this is when sending emails from web forms using them as the SMTP server.

When emails pass through their SMTP server, the from and reply-to addresses are rewritten to the default one for that account. So if the default account is someone@somewhere.com and the generated email from your php script sets the from address to donotreply@mywebsite.com. By the time it appears in your Gmail inbox, the from address would have been replaced with someone@somewhere.com. This becomes a problem when downloading emails, Google POP server does not allow the download of emails where the from address is the same as the default account address. Bugger! (They do not make this very clear, tut tut)

The only way round this is to change the default email address for the account. But if you have several sites with several from addresses then this is not a viable solution.

A way to download emails via POP is to prefix your username with “recent:” like so:

recent:someone@somewhere.com

This works OK for me, but some people have had this download all emails, including junk. So test before committing to this.

Surprisingly, very few people are aware of Google Applications. Most know about Google Mail (Gmail), but did you know you can edit documents, keep a calendar, edit spreadsheets and create and publish simple web sites?

When setting my VPS server, one task was to set up and configure my mail server. A quick read of POSTFIX nearly sent me into a coma. Fortunately, an added bonus of Google apps is the ability to use them as your mail server. If you have control over your DNS you can add the settings (MX record) found in Google’s help pages and have it manage your incoming and outgoing emails.

There is a premier package, for a small amount you can be part of a service which guarantees 99% uptime. I have the basic free package and have yet (touch wood) to encounter any downtime.

For more information:

Google Applications
Setting up MX record
Setting up your MX record on Slicehost