Gmail Gets IMAP

I’ve been using Google’s Gmail for a while and really like it. It has plenty of storage, an excellent spam filter, a good web interface, and access via POP3. Oh yeah, its free, too. POP3 is a protocol that lets email programs like Outlook download your email, but POP3 is pretty simplistic. It doesn’t update the mail server with the read/unread status or if it has been responded to. It also doesn’t handle using folders and keeping the folders synchronized between your email client and the server. So for example, with POP3, if I read my Gmail at work over lunch and mark some messages as read online, when I go home they are still marked as unread in Outlook.

One of the reasons I like using Google’s services is that they are always making improvements. Recently, they added IMAP support to Gmail which was the one feature I had been wanting. The IMAP protocol is more advanced and does handle the above issues. If you access your Gmail online as well as using a client like Outlook, you might want to consider switching over, but if you only access it at home it won’t make much difference. I switched over and have been very happy with it. The only thing that is a little odd is that Gmail uses tags instead of folders so IMAP has to map the Gmail tags to folders. Since Gmail lets you add two different tags to an email, it might show up in two folders in your client. You may also want to turn off your clients junk mail filter since Gmail’s filter is probably better and will have already filtered out the junk. If you are interested in learning more, go to Gmail’s IMAP help page here. Don’t forget to enable IMAP in your Gmail settings too.

So what could be better than Gmail? How about your own personal Gmail server for your domain name like @drozmonkey.com? Stay tuned…