IMAP in Gmail
Gmail is rolling out IMAP support to its users (do you have it yet?). Like POP, IMAP lets you access your Gmail from other clients, like Outlook, Thunderbird, or even your iPhone. Unlike POP, though, IMAP offers 2-way communication between your client and your web Gmail. That means that the actions you take in your client (tagging & archiving mail, deleting mail, reading mail, etc), will automatically synchronize between the client & the webmail.
If you want to see if you have IMAP available in your Gmail account, you can either watch the video below (it also shows how to set it up on the iPhone) or do this: click Settings, and then see if the 5th tab is named “Forwarding and POP” or if it’s named “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”. If it says “IMAP”, then you can go ahead and set it up!
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Thanks for explaining this! I had heard that gmail was rolling out IMAP, but I never really understood the difference between POP and IMAP. I still don’t have it (blast!), but I’ll be super happy when I do. I’m pretty addicted to Apple’s Mail client and it would be oh so sweet not to have to clean up my inbox in-browser every week or two.
Miriam wrote me to let me know the following, which I’m now sharing with you:
“I just realised why I (still) haven’t gotten IMAP yet. I had my language preference set to English (UK) and, according to the help page, the only option you can check and still get IMAP is English (US). So, if you’re using Spanish or French or even English(UK), you’re not eligible for IMAP yet. So, I’ve changed my language setting and lets hope that works….”