I want to add my voice to that of all the people who are complaining about the inability of Gmail to correctly deal with mailing lists, when using IMAP.

I filter some mailing lists to their respective folders. When I answer an e-mail sent to a mailing list, the sent message is not filed in the same folder as the rest of the conversation (it only appears in the Sent Mail folder). Therefore, when I read mailing lists using a client (like Thunderbird or Mail.app) I cannot see the complete threads. Which is really annoying.

This problem is unique to people accessing through IMAP (I don’t know about POP). When reading the mail using the web interface everything is fine.

I always have been a happy user of Gmail. Its inteface is probably one of the most interesting interfaces ever done for e-mail. However, I also like to read my e-mail through IMAP, it allows me to use Gmail off-line.

But this IMAP implementation has a huge problem. It doesn’t deal well with character encodings. Many messages that I can read well from the web interface or after having downloaded them through POP, don’t show well through IMAP. I tried this with Thunderbird and with Mail.app.

Google has always been encoding savvy, but it looks like this time they forgot we live in a multilingual world.