The Gmail team is always trying to enhance user experience with its Labs Features. this time they have released a new Labs feature Advanced IMAP Controls that gives you much more control over how your mailbox is accessed via IMAP.

Once you enable this Labs feature via Settings Panel, you can control which labels would show up in IMAP. After enabling Advanced IMAP Controls, go to Labels Settings and you can uncheck "Show in IMAP" corresponding to folder you don’t want to show in IMAP.

This feature is quite useful in case you find your IMAP application getting sluggish accessing Gmail as you can now apply a filter and prevent heavy mails from arriving in IMAP app.

There’s another feature that this Labs feature provides. Whenever you delete a message from IMAP, Gmail automatically deletes it as compared to normal IMAP behavior in which messages are first marked as ‘to be deleted’ and deleted next time your IMAP app syncs with e-mail provider.

Now you can enable traditional IMAP method of deleting messages next time IMAP app syncs with Gmail or you can send your message to Trash or archive it rather than permanently removing it.

To enable this feature Go to Forwarding and POP/IMAP in Gmail Settings.