Oh happy day - Gmail’s going IMAP!

The one thing I have always wished for, asked for (repeatedly), and complained about is the fact that Gmail does no support IMAP. POP3 is fine for occasional mail triage but on a daily basis it means that redundancy becomes part of your routine, killing productivity. Native Gmail clients or streamlined web interfaces on devices like the iPhone and Nokia N95 help reduce this duplication of effort but POPing Gmail into Mail.app or Outlook means that I’m maintaining two unaligned stores of information.

That is apparently coming to an end. Phillip Lessen at Google Blogoscoped reports that the Googlers are rolling out IMAP to Gmail accounts. Download Squad broke the story and has video. It hasn’t shown up in my account yet but I am counting the minutes, hours, or days until I get this capability. Lessen writes:

Gmail seems to be rolling out IMAP support. IMAP is short for Internet Message Access Protocol and allows you to access your Gmail emails from other clients, like Outlook or Thunderbird. Wait, wasn’t that already possible for some time using POP (Post Office Protocol)? Yes, but IMAP is superior, as Google explains in their help entry.

Here’s how you can check if IMAP is already available for your Gmail account; click Settings, and check if the fifth tab is named “Forwarding and POP” or if it’s already named “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”. If the latter is the case – DownloadSquad has a screenshot showing this – you are lucky and can start configuring your IMAP client if you wish to. (If you don’t see IMAP in Gmail yet you might also want to try logging out of Gmail and logging back in, though that didn’t help here and may just have worked coincidentally for some of you.)

Update: Here’s the official announcement.