Outlook 2007's IMAP interface is kinda flaky

I wanted to get a ton of mail off my PC and into Gmail and was looking around for a tool to do that when  I read on a blog that Outlook could actually do it by itself - just open your gmail account in Outlook using the IMAP interface and drag/drop the mail from your PST into the Gmail folders. Awesome.

Would have been brilliant if it worked. I was using Outlook 2003 until I started on this quest. 2003 managed to open my Gmail account, but segfaulted after about 1500 headers read from the server. Repeatedly.

No worries though, I can download Office 2007 from MSDN and install that - been meaning to upgrade for ages anyway. OK, so Outlook 2007 takes much longer to load a chews a ton more memory, but hey, at least it can download all the headers from Gmail without crashing. Yay for Outlook.

I guess IMAP is a really hard protocol to implement or something though, because Outlook frequently hangs during the copying of mail messages. The progress dialog just freezes. Who knows why. One time it popped up a message box saying the network connection failed while it was updating headers (oh noes!) which reappeared immediately as soon as you clicked OK. Had to kill Outlook to get out of that as well.

So in summary: It's nice that Outlook can do what it's trying to do here (drag/drop mail into IMAP servers), but maybe it would be better if it didn't let you so you could move straight on to finding a tool that can actually get the job done.

btw. I have to say, now I've finally had a chance to play with them, I think the ribbon bar in Word and Excel is a work of genius and everybody that slagged them off is an idiot. Just my humble opinion