kate hollenbach

This was all over tech news headlines today, but Google is finally supporting IMAP for Gmail. I’m excited about this for a couple of reasons — first, it means that I can finally back up all the e-mail I’ve sent over the last couple years or so since I started using Gmail. I love Gmail, and I can’t imagine going back to an email client with less support for viewing e-mail threads, but I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with all that personal data living only on Google’s servers. The other reason I’m excited about this is that it opens up some new possibilities for me to play with visualizing e-mail again. When I was working on Emdash I used my MIT e-mail account for testing, so I was missing over a year’s worth of sent messages. Now that I can access those messages easily with an IMAP interface, I have some data I can use to start working on visualizing two-way e-mail communication. And I can use E15 to do it. I’m psyched.