Gmail’s finally answered the call of email geeks everywhere. After recently upping the capacity of their free mail service, Google has enabled IMAP Gmail support. What does an IMAP-enabled Gmail account mean? Well, Gmail users can keep their accounts sync’ed up across their desktop, laptop, mobile phone, or any other device that you use to access Gmail. Tired of having to mark emails as “read” on your laptop, only to have to mark them as “read” on your mobile phone? Gmail’s IMAP feature is the answer!
Your Gmail account will reflect any changes, like reading, deleting, sorting, email folder structure, etc., across all your devices. Say you make a change (read, delete, move, etc.) to your Gmail account through your iPhone. You’ll find the changes appear in your desktop email client as well as your web-based Gmail account.
Log into your Gmail account and check the “Settings” tab. You should see the IMAP feature under the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” section. Gmail provides instructions to help you setup Gmail IMAP on your computer’s email client and even your iPhone. It only takes a few minutes of setup-time, and then your account is as powerful as many corporate IMAP setups!
IMAP’s been around for a while, but it’s a first for Gmail – which is great, seeing as how Gmail gives you 4+ GB of free email storage. Massive amounts of synchronize email goodness. Thanks Google!