IMAP Support Comes to Gmail

For the more advanced GMail users, IMAP support has been one of the most requested feature – in blogs, gmail help group, forums and online petitions. Even David Murray, an Associate Product Manager at Google, has said in his blogpost on the the official Gmail blog about this new featuure that he has signed the petition for IMAP support in Gmail before he went to work for Google.

First, what is it with IMAP that makes many Gmail fans so passionate about it? IMAP support in Gmail will mean that you can manage your gmail account using different devices (iPhone, Blackberry, etc) which supports IMAP or using different email software in your computer (Outlook, Thunderbird) and your changes will be seen across all these different interfaces to Gmail. Unlike POP, which downloads your gmail messages to your local email client, IMAP actually lets you access your gmail through Google’s servers instead. So for example, messages that you have moved in your IMAP-configured Outlook will instantly reflect on your iPhone accessing Gmail through IMAP. With IMAP, you’re working on just one gmail account instance, but you’re using different ways to manage it.

To enable the feature when your get the update, go to your Gmail settings, and go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.The Gmail Help center has already posted instructions on setting up Gmail IMAP on the following email clients:

Outlook Express
Outlook 2003
Outlook 2007
Thunderbird 2.0

Of course, iPhone gets the special treatment (considering that many other mobile devices support IMAP) complete with its own instruction page and a YouTube instructional video to boot. Google has also posted all the details you need to configure IMAP on other email clients not mentioned above.

With the competition on the free email space already heating up (Hotmail and Yahoo have just recently released new versions of their respective web mail products), this move by Google could be a precedent to more free IMAP support on other email services.

The question of course that gets asked the most is how will this affect Google’s strategy in advertisements in email? Will we finally see ads appended to email we sent from Gmail? This is an interesting thing to watch out for in the coming months.

Google has started rolling out this update to all Gmail and Google Apps users and I can’t wait to see mine get updated. Got IMAP on your Gmail already? Chime in with your feedback in the comments.