Looks interesting. IMAP is a pain! We spent months trying to get really simple stuff working for a mail client we're building (http://www.sortd.com). Actually, to be accurate it runs inside Gmail because it's more of a way to manage email rather than a standalone client, but we still need to connect to the mailbox itself via IMAP. Started using context.io, which was useful, but they went kind of wayward from their original vision.

What about performance though? Things like search are almost just not viable with IMAP - WAY too slow - we find ourselves having to hack the Gmail DOM to do things we should be able to do directly via the mailbox.

Seems to me that IMAP needs to be updated or replaced. What do you think of the new Gmail API?