Which email client works best with GMail IMAP? [closed]

I use GMail (and I use labels intensively) and because of having to use a very slow Internet connection now I've came to the idea that I should try using a desktop email client.

What application (Thunderbird, Evolution, Claws, or some another) works best with GMail via IMAP?

First of all I want correct GMail labels support (for example an email client shouldn't think of GMail labels as of independent folders, treating messages with multiple labels as multiple different identical messages in different folders), incl. special GMail labels-folders like bin, spam, drafts and sent.

You're not going to find a client that does Gmail via IMAP and treats labels as labels instead of folders. This is because IMAP shows Gmail's labels as folders, so any email client that you use is going to see folders, not labels.

So really, your question boild down to: Is there a desktop mail client that treats IMAP folders as if they were labels? To that, my answer is that I don't know of any.

Offline GMail Extension for Chrome

You can convert it into a complete offline application by going to Wrench -> Tools -> Create Application Shortcuts.

It offers amazing integration with GMail (labels, priority inbox, multiple accounts, conversation view, etc) and was ported from the iPad interface of GMail, which makes it look very cool.

This runs on HTML5 offline storage unlike the previous version(pableu's answer) which ran on Google Gears (now deprecated). Here's a blog entry announcing it.

Thunderbird's the easiest to set up for GMail IMAP, as it has all the info re: their servers/ports/ssl settings already. In my experience it's the most customizable with regards to filters, etc as well.

Note that Thunderbird is working to Improve Gmail Interoperabilit during this Summer of Code. See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721316 for all the details.

In short:

The biggest win here is probably avoiding downloading the same message to offline stores and indexing it multiple times, by using X-GM-MSGID. X-GM-THRID may help with threading in gloda, cross-folder views, and even within a folder. There are probably other things we can do to improve our Gmail integration. For example, we could avoid notifying for multiple new messages just because a message has multiple tags.

There are already some patches which are waiting for review, so it should come quite soon!

I think they all work pretty well. Evolution is what I have been using for years. Not a hitch. Works better than the web client since the interface is less all over the place.