Comments on: GMail FINALLY Supports IMAP

By: onerythym

onerythym — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:25:14 +0000

This is exciting news. Why arent all gmail accounts getting this? Ive had a gmail for years now… It still has only POP…

Are they rolling it out in phases?

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:34:52 +0000

Thanks CHI! That makes sense now; it will be nice to read a message on Mail and then see it marked as “read” on my web app.
Thanks for the concise answer!

By: Chi

Chi — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:13:09 +0000

@Michael

IMAP supports a two way connection between the mail server and your mail client. Thus with IMAP, messages read on your client (whether it’s Outlook, Thunderbird, or iPhone) are also marked as read on the server (so you don’t have to reread the message again on gmail.com via web browser).

POP typically either downloads (and deletes the original copy) or duplicates e-mail on the client and the server. In the first scenario of deleting the original copy, it defeats the purpose of Gmail’s excessive storage space (and their claim to never have to delete e-mails again). And in the second scenario, this would mean that even after you read/archive a e-mail on your client, you’d have to do it again on the server via the web browser.

IMAP seeks to eliminate this. Which is quite nice.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:18:05 +0000

I’m a little slow with the acronyms and technology, but what does this mean for me? I have been using gmail through my “Mail” app on Mac OSX for a year now, and I can check and reply to all my messages without using google’s web interface. I guess that’s POP? What do I get differently if I set up email with IMAP?

By: Ronald Poi

Ronald Poi — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 05:38:09 +0000

Great news!… hope to use it soon on my Google Apps

By: Dominik

Dominik — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 05:37:43 +0000

Well – it makes me extremely excited.

I think it took them so long because they needed to anwer two questions first:

* How to serve ads over IMAP?
* How to map their whole label system to the “classic” folder system that IMAP supports?

Since I can’t switch to IMAP yet – how did they do it?

By: chad

chad — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 05:05:42 +0000

bout damn time… only took them what… 4 years? Just shy of a half decade?!

You’d think a multibillion dollar company with some of the best and brightest at the reigns would have gotten shit pushed out in … oh I dunno… at least 05′

whatever though, I’m cynical … hooray for IMAP *FINALLY*

By: Abraham Estrada

Abraham Estrada — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 04:48:40 +0000

Of course I´m excited because with IMAP support now I can have push-gmail in my Treo using Chatteremail.

By: Howard

Howard — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 04:41:24 +0000

It’s not working atm but I hope it’ll work soon… I don’t see “Enabling IMAP” under my gmail settings yet. But, FINALLY…. something worth using… kudos to Google

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 03:21:47 +0000

It’s about F’ing time! Maybe I can finally quit the web interface for something a little faster.