I finally got the new IMAP option enabled in my Gmail account today. I was really excited when they added the option, so far I’m not impressed. I’m going to give it another day or two, but I might be either going back to pop or setting the mail to forward and archive (not sure why I never did this before). My current beefs with it are:

• Slow – It can be really slow. Painfully. I can see my “All Mail” access being slow since it has about 50k articles in it (Gmail is used for all of my mailing lists), but all of the other folders/labels are empty except for incoming email that is filtered to them. They take a few seconds to load and then a couple more seconds to select or delete an email. Even the “All Mail” folder is slower then it should be. Right now I’ve been sitting here for about 15 min. with Mail “Comparing notes with server” which is way too long (it already did the initial sync).
• Filtering – Right now, it doesn’t seem to work correctly. Well, the filtering itself seems to work. The problem is that most of the time the folder that the message was filtered to doesn’t show that it has new email until I click onto the folder. This might have something to do with it not supporting the /Recent flag or bad timing on my part, I’m not sure it. I’ll see in the morning if it’s the latter.
• Incorrect Unread counts – the unread counts on folders (the couple times they’ve been updated after filtering) are showing up double what they should, i.e. 3 new messages are received but the unread count shows 6. This might be related to the issue where the same email is being listed multiple times for people.
• Read flags are not always sticking – I keep getting a group of 256 old articles in my “All Mail” folder showing up as unread. The IMAP server doesn’t seem to always be updating the mail store it seems.

We’ll see how it goes over then next couple of days. Hopefully the issues (especially the slowness) are due to Google still getting the servers up and due to the servers being hammered with everyone setting up and trying out the new IMAP feature. I’m not very optimistic though.