IMAP

Raised as a usability problem by 14 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2013–2025), in 12 threads.

People raised many different problems with IMAP, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 14 complaints

IMAP search is unusably slow with large mailboxes of 100k+ threads2025-11-12
Actions and push notifications don't sync properly when using webmail accounts via third-party IMAP clients2025-05-08
Moving emails between folders creates duplicate emails2024-12-23
Advanced search and sync need extensions that may be missing on a server, forcing fallback parsing2022-09-26
Built-in mail search is too limited, making it hard to find old messages2022-06-10
IMAP clients feel clunky, counter-intuitive, with weird search limits and rigid folders2020-06-19
Painfully slow because it fetches each message individually, hitting throttling2020-06-04
Moving a message re-uploads and re-downloads it, which is wasteful and often fails2019-08-18
Email client on phone has become slow and laggy to use2019-08-17
Folders need manual pull-to-refresh; deleted messages linger for seconds; unread counts sometimes wrong2019-08-17
Mail filtering and search are confusing for normal people and never standardized2017-04-16
Deleting a message requires a second delete, and syncing is very slow2014-07-03
Fetching the 10 most recent threads from large mailboxes is very slow, so users wait2014-01-29
Moving an IMAP message to an unknown local folder deletes it from the server2013-07-18