I’ve used GMail’s IMAP with both Thunderbird and Evolution now, and in both cases the just plug it in and go solution is completely unusable. This seems to be because the protocol involves checking your user credentials, passing server access commands, and transferring the reply to check for new mail and download it for every single folder you have, or for every _message_ if you don’t have the download for offline use option set. The problem of course becomes worse if you have a larger number of folders - due to lots of FLOSS mailing lists, I have around 200.I would recommend setting up your client to download all mail for offline use, provided you have the HDD space. Additionally, since all of my mail is either in a folder or still waiting in the Inbox to be sorted, I set the option for “only show subscribed folders”, and unsubscribe from the catch-all “GMail” folder. If you have a lot of e-mails to read and don’t anticipate replying to many, reading mail goes a lot faster of you choose to “work offline” while doing so.
