Ok.

I have a Gmail account. I need to be able to access my email on 2 machines, one at home, one at my office.

I want to have all my email on both machines, I want a mail I send on one machine to be in the sent items on the other.

IMAP you say? Exactly, but it is so damn slow with large mailbox.

What can I do?

Use a web browser, with offline GMail cache?

How big’s the mailbox? And what imap clients?

I’ve several devices all using a gmail imap account, with about ~6K messages at any one time. First sync takes a while then it’s fine, plenty fast.

Mostly Apple email clients, but also a nokia one, and have used thunderbird in the past.

In gmail, there’s a better imap support labs function you can turn on, I don’t sync the “all mail” folder which helps (but I used to, prior to a few weeks ago, and it was fine too).

In summary, I blame your email client or its setup.

Use a web browser, with offline GMail cache?

+1

Linky

With GMail I tend to just use the web interface when I’m at a computer and using the mail client on my phone.

Never had any problems with using it on the web, it’s as fast I find as using a mail client.

Clients are Outlook on PC and Thunderbird on OSX.

Mailbox is just short of 1gb.

Suspect it might be Outlook since Thunderbird on OSX is better – though still not nippy. Unfortunately I’m stuck with Outlook on PC.

Will have a look at the labs IMAP function

GMail also has Exchange capability, that may work better for you in Outlook.

Hosted Exchange solution? $10 a month at Mail2web.com, forward gmail to mail2web and set gmail as your alternate address on mail2web and no one will even know you’ve done it.

Works really well, I’ve got it syncing 3 PCs, one Windows Phone 7 thing and an iPad exactly as you’ve asked for. In addition to mail, you get Calendar, Tasks, Contacts all synced all over the place.

Calendar, Tasks, Contacts all synced all over the place.

Google supply this service anyhow, through an exchange interface if it’s what you need.

I have imap accounts with gmail, btyahoo & 123-reg. The gmail one has a handfull of emails stored yet takes an age to sync to outlook (2007 I think) on my desktop.

I suggest trying an alternative to gmail & see if that works better for you.