[nateswart]

I hadn't seen anything like this posted before (I could be wrong) so I thought I'd share and see if anyone had any further ideas or comments.

The problem:
Gmail + IMAP + Mail.app - if I create an action from an email in my inbox and then move that message to the 'All Mail' archive, the link in OF is broken. Tangentially to this is the annoyance that Mail.app reflects 2 new emails for every new email, due to the Inbox + All Mail issue.

My solution:
I created a new mail rule for each email account. All new email was immediately moved to my 'All Mail' archive (and left unread). I then created a smart folder for all unread email. If you wanted, you could make a separate 'new mail' smart folder for each account but I only wanted one inbox.

The result:
Any task in OF with a link to a mail message keeps the link integrity since it's linked to the original email message in the 'All Mail' archive. Also, read email is automatically 'removed' from my email inbox (being that it is a smart folder for only unread mail. This is one less step for me in achieving inbox zero and makes the whole process a bit more automatic.

Does anyone have any other ideas (or ideas to build on this one)? I was a bit frustrated with the Mail.app integration at first (due mainly to Gmail + IMAP), but am finding this solution to work fairly well for me.

Thanks for any comments!

[iNik]

That's an inelegant but decent solution to dealing with Gmail's IMAP weirdness.

Gmail's IMAP implementation bloats Mail's database so badly that I had to finally just give up on it. Just too weird. It's POP3 mode works quite well, and it will even archive sent messages, but you just won't get folder sync from your Mac to the server. Everything just routes to "Archive" when you download it. (Although you can still tag it in Gmail)

[chinarut]

I had the same IMAP bloat issue in the past and gave up on it as well for my primary gmail account which receives a high volume of emails and has archives dating back to 2005.

I had already created a gmail account for the purpose of GTD processing only and IMAP works great on it. You can even specify the rule to file to a "folder" that is actually a label and it works great. (in my case, it's called "@@OmniFocus")

perhaps you can do the same thing and link to emails in this special OF folder/label that shows up in Mail.app?