Here’s something troubling I’ve run into over the past 24 hours. I was moving someone over to the free Google Apps for your Domain setup, which provides free Gmail services @yourdomain.com. The client had an iPhone and wanted to move away from POP3 to an IMAP environment.
Sounds straightforward, right? So I thought, I had it set up in about an hour with email coming and going just fine, and no interruption of email. Great, but today, I get a call from the client saying that incoming mail messages are missing. Some don’t show up in Inbox, and some fail to even show up in the catch-all All Mail folder. However, these messages appear just fine in the Inbox folder… when viewing the webmail version. So, the problem is specific to the IMAP access for Gmail.
And, it appears I’m not alone in running into this problem. Google has yet to acknowledge it, of course. And, it’s not linked to a single email client… it has been confirmed on Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and I also believe Entourage as well… possibly Outlook too. This puts the problem right back at the service provider… Google.
And now, I look like a complete idiot setting up a client on an email service that looses messages… which is why he wanted to move from POP3 to IMAP in the first place. Great, now I’m out the time and money to move his to another service, and of course I have to do it at no additional charge to maintain my credibility.
My advice: feel free to try out Gmail IMAP on your own setup… just don’t put it on anyone else right now.
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Yes,
we have a client reporting missing messages using outloook 2007. However, the messages are available on his PDA running windows mobile edition.
This could be related to indexing, something seen before in outlook POP that only corrected itself by removing and re-establishing the account.
I haven’t ruled out 3rd party virus or spam programs.
Mark
It’s certainly not a virus on my setup… we’re talking a clean-install of Mac OS X and an iPhone… those were the only two devices tapping Gmail.
Considering that there are a number of users having this issue on Gmail’s discussion forums, it appears to be a problem on Google’s end.
google for gmail recent:username
I have the exact same problem. Emails from Gmail setup on my domain are missing in the Mail application of my iPod Touch. I can see all my emails fine in the Gmail web interface on my domain and in Mac OSX Mail. They are perfectly in sync. Its a shame to be missing messages on my iPod.
Did you find a solution to this problem?
Nik
Unfortunately, Google has made some improvements… but no solid fix. IMAP remains a big reason why Gmail (and thus, Google Apps) are still in beta.
Google has told me that Premier customers (those paying $50/account/year) should email Google Apps support. Google will eventually ask for the email headers of the affected messages, and try to tweak your account into working properly.
But, I see it happen frequently. I still have no idea why iPhone OS Mail is the only client affected by this bug. Still, it only happens with Gmail’s reverse engineered IMAP protocol… and even Google has tacitly admitted the problem is on their end.
I have exactly the same issue. I tried using Imap on Outlook 2007, and new emails go out fine from outllok, however cannot view any messages in Gmail’s mail folders such as “All” or “Inbox”.
It seems Outlook express is ok with GMail Apps / IMAP.
The things is it can’t apply filter on IMAP folder :(
The emails i receive on IMAP on my mobile or thunderbird does not show up on gmail when I login.
As a developer I started using the App engine to host static files for customers but now I realise I could have doubled our down time in a worst case situation.
FWIW: I’ve also witnessed missing email when viewing emails in mutt (unix command line program) but they are there when viewed via the gmail.com website.
Short version: Switching the iPhone from IMAP client to Microsoft Exchange client fixes this! See instructions here: http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252, found via http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/.
Long version:
I just ran into this exact issue: some mails from Google Apps email accounts not showing up in Mail on iPhone 4, when connected to Google Apps as an IMAP client. My consulting client and I decided to live with it for a few days – for example to see if it only affected emails migrated from their old provider, and not new email going forward.
In the mean time, we moved on to syncing calendars and contacts. To do that, I deleted the IMAP Google client from the iPhone and set up a new account using the Microsoft Exchange option.
Guess what? No more missing emails on the iphone! It seems that asking Apple and Google to talk to one another using the Microsoft standard makes for less buggy interaction.
This is with the free version of Google Apps too. You have to get the paid, Business, version to sync Outlook with Google Apps (via a sync tool download, which is only available for Windows – so not useful for Office for Mac 2011 users). But currently at least, the Exchange sync protocol is available for mobile clients even in the free version.
Jon, using Google Sync is indeed the best (new) solution.
On iPhone, you will also want to have a Google Apps Gmail setup to ensure you can continue to sync Calendars and Notes.
Google Sync will also net you push contact sync, something that the Gmail account listing does not support.