By now you have no doubt seen that Google is (finally) offering free IMAP for their mail service. Based on the number of posts I’ve seen today, I can tell I’m not the only one excited about this news. 
Why am I excited? Well, one reason is that I was about to pay money for a utility to move mail from Outlook to Google (we just switched at the office). Now, I can just add the IMAP account in Outlook and drag’n'drop over the stuff I want to copy up to the hosted Google Mail. Easy, free and painless.
Which brings up a point: I bet the folks selling those utilities aren’t real thrilled about this…
Another reason for excitement: This makes it very easy to access your email from multiple clients and have them all “in sync”. I can check my mail from my iPAQ, on the web or from Outlook and know that I’m seeing the same stuff each time.
Up until now, we only had POP3 access from Google Mail. The problem with POP3 clients is that, by default, they download the mail from the server to the client. So, if you check mail with another client, you don’t see what you saw earlier.
Now, you can configure a POP3 client to leave mail on the server, but now you get to re-read it as “new” mail from each client.
IMAP is so much better when using multiple clients!
This also gives folks the option of using an email client they’re more comfortable with, but keeping the mail safely in “the cloud” at Google. I suspect a few folks at work will catch on to this soon.
Yep, definitely a huge win for the consumers. Not so huge for the utility guys.
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October 24th, 2007 
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If only Outlook came with an “Archive” tab…
Well, Outlook offers Archiving and archives can be listed in the left pane’s folder list. (I’m using Outlook 2k2 and 2k3, dunno what 2k7 is like). So, in a sense, it kind of does.
Tools -> Options, “Other” tab and then AutoArchive to setup the particulars.
IMAP options are still not showing up for me
Really stoked about being able to use this.
Same. Hopefully soon.
Great, if it does work. I have been using outlook via POP3 for GMail and had the same prob. now it’d be fine.
[...] afternoon my premier hosted and free non-hosted Google Mail accounts both got their IMAP options, so I can stop whining about that particular topic. I was 1 for 3 there for a while, but now all 3 [...]