It appears that Google has pulled support for IMAP, although it’s unclear whether this is a temporary decision, the result of a bug, or a permanent change of policy. Google first rolled out support for IMAP in October.
IMAP allows email users to manage their email using alternative clients (such as the desktop app Thunderbird or Mail) without creating copies of their messages, as happens with POP. This means that users never have to use the Gmail web interface and can effectively bypass all of Google’s ads there.
We’ve contacted Google to determine the cause of this disappearance. We’ll run an update when we’ve heard back.
Nothing has been posted on the Official Gmail Blog about this yet and the Gmail help center still has instructions for using IMAP with Gmail.
Thanks for the tip, Mark.
Update: Don’t panic everybody, IMAP support is back…hopefully to stay. We’re also hearing in the comments that users have been having issues with chat as well.
Update 2: Google has sent us this official response, which doesn’t really provide any insight into what caused the problem, just acknowledges that it did occur:
“Gmail users had some difficulty accessing certain features in Gmail for about a half hour today, including IMAP access and chat. The issue is now resolved. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we encourage anyone who is having technical difficulty of any kind with Gmail to contact the Gmail Support team through the Gmail Help Center.”
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NO! NO! NO!
The ship is down, the ship is down!
It is very likely a bug issue. I don’t see google pulling the plug on a popular feature that got so much publicity when they spend so many dollars acquiring companies and taking the time to provide new features.
I was wondering why I couldn’t access my mail. Glad to hear it wasn’t just me. Though this is gonna be really bad for Google PR….
Looks like it was a bug. Google Chat in GMail was down for me most of the afternoon. Looks like both are working for me as of right now
yeah wtf all of a sudden I can’t get my mail on my iphone. Good coverage TC. This is the best feature of gmail.
Works fine for me…
Gmail is back!
I’m sure it’s just technical difficulties; they had to rollback to a previous version or something.
I haven’t had a problem all day. The IMAP configuration screen is visible.
I discovered this a few minutes ago when I got an email from Xoopit telling me it couldn’t connect to my account. Xoopit relies on Gmail’s IMAP support. Is Google disabling Xoopit?
IMAP is back!
I noticed that for a while, imap was missing from Gmail’s settings. There were also some UI issues on the front page and the Google chat was unable to connect. I just refreshed a second ago and now its all back. Maybe it was a bug.
This is a good argument against “cloud computing”.
Like #9, I haven’t had any problems all day and can still see the IMAP screen just fine — though I can also confirm that the chat hasn’t been stable until just a few moments ago.
So who is sitting around, trolling Gmail option screens looking for something missing? DAMN! I want that job! Must be a slow news day.
Oddly, my IMAP didn’t seem to disappear, but my chat did. I don’t know if IMAP was actually working, just that it still appeared in my settings.
While I’m hoping this is just an outage of sorts, it makes me nervous that they’ve pulled all IMAP related options from the Settings screen.
FYI, this is also affecting the “Gmail for Domains” hosted solution, not just the public Gmail service (which is particularly painful for businesses relying on this service).
Both chat and IMAP not working for me…something is wrong at the Googleplex.
Operation Chicken Little 2008 is over; please resume your normal daily activities.
IMAP appears to be up and down still for me (4:30 PM EST). It keeps appearing and disappearing from the GMail interface.
mine works fine.
Works for me. I see it on gmail.com and I’m getting my imap email dependably.
yep… it was down for quite a few hours…
google should put up a “notice” or something on their forwarding/pop page instead of just removing that section altogether. that is pretty lame.
OMG! Wikipedia has been pulled from the net! Are they out of money?????OMG!
[update] calm down people, it seems that I just misspelled wikipedia.org as ‘wiipedia.org’ when typing into the browser.
Huh. And I thought Googler’s actually knew what they were doing. Now they’re asymptotically approaching M$.
Uptime is now 98.9999 %, only 1% more to go!
wow, this was crazy. glad it’s over. thought my employer finally hunted me down. what a relief.
anybody else seeing igoogle on the iphone with a bug in the menubar?
You can see the twitter conversation over this on: http://twitter.summize.com/search?q=imap+google
Assumptions
Works fine for me! Haven’t seen a glitch and been using it all day!
So Google is NOT infallible! Wow!
Another reminder (warning!) that Gmail is still a “beta” service. And that sometimes you get what you (don’t) pay for.
the other thing to note is that they updated the main google navbar in the upper left and I noticed a stylyesheet change to the way it handles labels. may just have been an update that went wrong…
before I noticed the change, the service was responding very slowly - usually an indication of server or network switching
or, perhaps we just noticed a glitch in the matrix… was that cat on my gmail account before?
IMAP has been buggy from day one, to the point that after testing it for a couple of days I switched back to POP access because it was unusable for me.
Still evaluating Gmail for our company email. There are so many pluses it’s hard to resist.
Um.
…
You’re the same guy who posted the “OMG bug in Tumblr let’s post this RIGHT NOW DON’T WAIT FOR A RESPONSE GO GO GO!” the other day, aren’t you? This is like that, except kinda more accusatory.
Mark, I appreciate your desire to be on top of things and to scoop everyone else. I really do. But perhaps you should consider decaf for a while.
Hopefully, they’re making it faster. I can’t use Gmail IMAP for large folders unless the mail client has caching built in.
I am accessing gmail IMAP just fine.
I know you guys like to get the scoop, but personally, I don’t need to read stories about every bug on major web sites…..or even a service outage, for that matter.
Don’t you guys have insiders you can call to verify these “stories”?
Thank goodness it’s back!
Gmail IMAP has been flaky for me for weeks, at least when accessed in Outlook.
@R-Bro: Same via Thunderbird. Sadly when a server is unavailable TBird has a habit of dumping the saved password and asking for it again over and over. So I’m hassled for my mail password while it sits in the tray checking for new mail every couple of minutes.
I’ve had probs accessing (via TB) yesterday AND today. Whatever it is doesn’t seem to be completely resolved. Fortunately, I have been able to just default back to the web interface.
@Wade - I was looking for some confirmation that others are/were experiencing issues as well. I appreciate knowing that it isn’t/wasn’t just me. It can help me to know how far I need to dig into an issue. Call it “scoop” if you want, but I see it more as a PSA and thank Mark for posting it.
Perhaps it was one of those maintenance.
error
cannot receive attachments for over a month now some server error.anybody know?????