Yeah, Gmail does IMAP, it's on Mobile

Gmail does IMAP, story at eleven -- or, well, close to two in the morning Eastern. Anyway, more over at Engadget Mobile, although desktop IMAP enthusiasts will probably also want to revel in the news.

[peter @ Oct 24th 2007 1:47AM]

Great. I have been waiting for this for months and months, ever since I got my Gmail account. I basically let it fall into disuse after I got a Macbook and started using Mail.app, since my AOL account and my college email both supported IMAP, but Gmail couldn't get in there easily. My account hasn't gotten the IMAP support yet, so I'm still waiting, but now I can finally start to use Gmail regularly again, and have access to that storage and everything that is good about it.

Now, if only I had an iPhone to take full advantage of this :.(

[Angelo @ Oct 24th 2007 2:20AM]

GMail always worked really well with Mail.app... Google even had a little tutorial on how to set it up. I've been using it for years with Mail and it works perfectly.

[Nick @ Oct 24th 2007 12:10PM]

Gmail supported POP and so does Mail.app, so why did you need to wait for gmail to support IMAP?

[peter @ Oct 24th 2007 12:14PM]

Because POP is harder to use, and changes aren't reflected on the multiple machines that I use.

[Kyrra @ Oct 24th 2007 2:05AM]

This is amazing, I was wondering if Google was going to provide imap support. A welcome addition to gmail's feature set, thanks Google!

[KarlW @ Oct 24th 2007 2:26AM]

Agree with you. Google add features quite regularly (although they did take their time with IMAP). This is a really welcome addition - finally it's easy to read your email from desktop applications when you have multiple computers.

Is Gmail the best free email service available? Yes, the storage space is no longer too uncommon, but with the feature set constantly being expanded, I wouldn't switch to anything.

[Nick @ Oct 24th 2007 12:16PM]

Lets not forget how they dont sell your information. I only use Yahoo! as my "this site seems shady and they are probably gonna sell my info to spammers" email address. Funny how a chunk of the spam i get on the Yahoo! account seems to be addressing me by the fake name that i registered the account under with Yahoo!

All hail Gmail!

[Steve Wallen @ Oct 24th 2007 2:15AM]

Huh, iPhone still needs more Exchange Active Sync support.

[ThePengwin @ Oct 24th 2007 3:00AM]

They made windows mobile for that.

I really doubt apple and windwos will ever join forces and do that.

[Michael La Framboise @ Oct 24th 2007 2:39AM]

FINALLY - only been waiting for like 3 years for this :p - sheesh, and to think that Gmail used to lead the webmail market...

Granted they still have the cleanest outlay - but even that is getting boring - I mean I'm all for minimalism and whatnot, but they haven't changed anything design-wise since the launch in 04 :/

[Nick @ Oct 24th 2007 12:17PM]

they added the annoying IM client to it.

[Ricochet @ Oct 24th 2007 2:49AM]

If the POP/IMAP option isn't showing up for you, change your "Gmail Display Language" on the General tab of Settings to "English (US)".

I was using "English (UK)" and the option wasn't there. Enjoy!

[Dave @ Oct 24th 2007 5:53AM]

Ricochet:

Thanks for the great tip mate. I was wondering why it wasn't showing up :-)

[ximon @ Oct 24th 2007 9:48AM]

I already tried this on several of my Gmail accounts and not one of them shows IMAP support yet.

Sniff...

[CB17 @ Oct 24th 2007 2:56AM]

Am I the only one who's account this isn't showing up on?

[Brandon @ Oct 24th 2007 3:08AM]

Not working for me yet. :-/

[Adam Pennington @ Oct 24th 2007 3:20AM]

I'm another person who has been requesting this regularly for years. I use GMail to keep all of my mail in one place, and POP really defeats that. The way they're overloading IMAP folders to accomplish some of the GMail features like spam filing and labeling is nice. Has anyone figured out how to archive yet?

[Richard @ Oct 24th 2007 3:44AM]

Now they just have to have functional folders and its almost as good at every other mail provider.

[Kyran @ Oct 24th 2007 1:15PM]

From one of the Gmail IMAP help files:
"You'll notice that all of your custom Gmail labels will appear in your client as folders, with copies of the messages to which you've applied those labels."

That basically means your Gmail labels are your IMAP folders. If there's more than one label on a given message, that message will show up in all of those folders. If you want to add multiple labels onto a single message in your IMAP client, then you just copy that message to the relevant folders.

[Richard @ Oct 24th 2007 5:15PM]

Which are not how folders work, I end up with 2 seperate copies of the message, one tagged each way. Gmails decision to use tags instead of folders is one thing I really cannot stand about it. They are clearly different, and their efforts to say that they are in some way better is totally illogical.

[Kyran @ Oct 24th 2007 7:20PM]

IMAP's still not enabled on my account so I can't verify quite yet, but if this really does multiply the email on server side then that's horrendous. :/

[safetymatch @ Oct 24th 2007 6:25AM]

Here in Holland, it's still pop... :(

[kenny @ Oct 24th 2007 6:56AM]

just saw this in the gmail help section:
"Don't fret if you don't see "IMAP Access" yet under the Settings menu. We're rolling it out to everyone over the next few days."

So no need to post comments saying you haven't got it yet - it may take a day or two before it shows up in every account...

[Eric @ Oct 24th 2007 9:30AM]

I know you all are a bunch of AOL haters (and there are good reasons for it), but AOL has had this for YEARS.

[bmck @ Oct 24th 2007 9:45AM]

why do you need imap?

[ximon @ Oct 24th 2007 9:50AM]

Why do you need google?

[Nushio (NDF - Blue) @ Oct 24th 2007 11:00AM]

IMAP is POP3, but improved.

POP is a protocol for downloading messages from a mailserver, and storing them on your computer. The problem with POP, is that its only one-way.

What this means is that if you download your messages, and check them in Thunderbird (or your fav mail client), Gmail doesn't know you've read your messages, and for that reason, they're marked unread on the gmail server. Next time you login, you'll see hundreds of unread messages, even though you've already read them.

IMAP Provides 2 way communication, that enables your mail client to notify gmail of read messages, among other stuff like getting a notification when new mail arrives (instead of asking the server every 5-10 mins)

[Paul @ Oct 24th 2007 10:41AM]

Okay semi on topic. Google has a terrible policy of policing attachments that is keeping me and everyone in my classes (I teach at a university) from using Gmail. Basically not only do they block *potentially* unsafe attachments and not only do they block *potentially* unsafe attachments buried in zip files and not only is their definition of "*potentially* unsafe" extremely liberal, but they block the email itself (perhaps notifying the sender but never the recipient) instead of just stripping out the file and putting a note in the email that an attachment has been removed. Perhaps this doesn't affect many folks, but I teach databases and programming and Gmail blocks all messages with any kind of program (source code or exe) or database (mdb in this case) attached, even if it is zipped. This makes it worthless for communicating with students. Sure there are ways around this (rename file extensions, file sharing services, etc.), but it is a ridiculous extra step, and since my students (or potential students) wouldn't necessarily know I'm a Gmail user, they wouldn't know to jump through these hoops and since the failure notification goes only to them and is cryptic, they don't know what to do to fix it. I lost quite a number of emails this way before I figured out what the problem was.

Engadget, any chance you could post a story on this? I've tried to contact Gmail about it with little luck (in fact they got MORE restrictive). A little publicity requesting a change (even if it is only to strip the attachment instead of rejecting the entire email) would be EXTREMELY helpful.

Thanks!

[Jake @ Oct 24th 2007 11:25AM]

You mean to tell me that your database and programming students don't know how to add a ".removeme" extension to their files? If not, maybe that should be part of your first class session.

Also, when I took courses as far back as 3 years ago, every class could easily get a school-sponsored site where all files could be uploaded.

I think the vast majority of people would prefer that potentially-malicious code gets blocked, no matter if it's in a zip file or not.

[Mark @ Oct 24th 2007 11:48AM]

Jake, I think that Gmail is "smrt" enough to realize when you've renamed a forbidden filetype and still won't let it get through.

[brian welch @ Oct 24th 2007 12:48PM]

@mark

Nope. Changing the extension works like a champ. *(:=

[Paul @ Oct 24th 2007 12:54PM]

Jake, I said there were ways around this. However, it requires that the student knows that I have a gmail account (until I changed to eliminate the problem, I forwared my university account to gmail). If not, then they get a cryptic message saying that the message didn't make it through. In fact, if you are forwarding, the message that the student gets says that the email user doesn't exist and doesn't say a thing about attachments.

I'd really like the ability to turn off this "feature." However, minimally I'd like for the emails to pass through attachment free (with a note telling me that the attachment had been removed) so the I can contact the recipient with instructions on how to rename the file and resubmit it. As it is, things get lost.

Oh, and try sending a password encrypted zip file through gmail and see what (doesn't) happen...to save you the time, it waits a day and finally rejects it with no explanation.

The policy is okay in general (though it should be user configurable) but its implementation is awful.

PS - Mark, Google could be smart enough to know that an attachment had been renamed, but they aren't (thank goodness).

[jilie @ Oct 24th 2007 12:28PM]

IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE

[RickyRik @ Oct 24th 2007 5:28PM]

When are they gonna come out with the 16GB Iphone so that i can get one???

[Mike @ Oct 25th 2007 4:07PM]

Still no IMAP on my acccount. I'm gonna jump off the Golden Gate if I don't get it before tomorrow when I get Leopard. The new Apple Mail looks unreal, and want to use it with my Gmail.

[l3ny @ Oct 31st 2007 2:35PM]

Here is what i did.
Just make a new temporary email address they already come with IMAP/ Forward your real email to this new temp address-you can even delete as email arrive and are forwarded /in your iphone settings, on your Outgoing mail server put your real email address.
You don't even have to notified any email changes since it would seem that you are sending from the real one.
.sheers.

[Ajay @ Nov 1st 2007 1:42AM]

I didn't have the IMAP option either. So based on a suggestion above I changed the "Display Language" from US to UK.. saved... didnt work.. and then back to US. Somehow that did it for me.