I’m actually surprised nobody has posted anything about this online, but it’s more or less possible to write an IMAP proxy for Facebook using their API. Sure, you could not write a full-fledge IMAP implementation, but you could get it to perform the most basic tasks, like reading messages (and therefore also store them locally).
I got the idea of making an IMAP proxy (or bridge, parser or whatever you want to call it) back in in August when Facebook announced new API calls to access the mailbox. Upon reading them, I realized that it could be used for a lot new things, such as this. Since then, I’ve been waiting for someone take on the challenge. I’ve been keeping an eye open for a projects in this area, but haven’t seen any. Therefore, I thought I might at least raise some interest and perhaps someone will take on the challenge.
There are quite a few crappy email providers out there. If you did not pay attention when you chose your email provider, chances are that your email provider sucks. I’ve compiled a brief check-list for you that you can use to determine if your email provider sucks and that it’s time to move elsewhere.
The iPhone was launched without the capability to search emails. It took until iPhone OS 3.0 for this feature to be introduced. Unfortunately, the search feature is still limited to the headers (i.e. to, from, subject etc). You are not able to search the body of the messages (full-text search). This is a quite severe limitation, in particular for mobile business users.
Imagine this scenario: your boss sends an e-mail, and he needs a “yes” or “no” answer immediately. If you use a Gmail or Google Apps account with your iPhone, the e-mail won’t drop into your iPhone inbox immediately, even if you use IMAP to sync your e-mail. This has caused many users to devise