I use GMail for all my mailing list subscriptions with Apple's Mail.app as the desktop client using IMAP. It's not a bad combination but there are a couple of annoyances that are becoming severe irritants.

All Mail

It's a lovely concept when using the web interface but why why why does it appear in the IMAP one? Immediate effects are Unread counts are doubled and the client has to synchronise twice for every message. The exaggerated Unread counts are countered by using a Smart Mailbox for Unreads:

1. Message is Unread
2. Message type is Mail
3. Message is not in mailbox Trash
4. Message is not in mailbox All Mail

GMail doesn't support IMAP Subscriptions (yet! hint hint) , so you can't unsub from All Mail to avoid these side effects.

So that handles the client but on the server, I like to clean up my GMail account regularly; delete everything by selecting All Mail -> select All -> Delete. The problem is that if there is anything in the Inbox that hasn't been transferred to the Mac yet, I have to Get Mail and then quickly refresh the browser, then Select All+Delete. What I want is a way to select everything in GMail that hasn't been downloaded to the client yet. The best trick I've found is the following search term while in All Mail:

!in: inbox

(not mail in "inbox"). Works a treat.

Duplicates

Is it just me or does GMail/Mail.app lose the plot occasionally? I get whole batches of identical emails delivered 2 or 3 times. Luckily, they really are identical (same message ids) so an AppleScript such as this one works brilliantly.

Note 1: I have ~800k e-mails so while Mail Scripts seems technically superior, it takes an hour just to create the mailbox list. Another contender that should have been better for this situation is Tim Auton's Fast DeDup but it seems incompatible with 10.5.2 and Mail.app V3).

Note 2: I acknowledge that the duplicates may be connection interruptions during message downloads and given my Ethernet<->Linksys connection seems to have dropouts, that might be the trigger, but not the excuse.