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Gmail now supports IMAP.

I have been using Gmail for last 3 years, 2 months, 11 days now, right from the times when getting an invite was a privilege, i still remember i had to chose 6 close friends from among a lot of requests i got from friends for sending out invites when i was able to secure a gmail account.

Gmail as my dear friend Akash says had changed the rule of games in April of 2004 and i thought it was another april fool trick from the ever lively google bag of surprises. But, in reality Gmail did change the rules of the game every provider yahoo to what not ran to find a decent reply for the gauntlet thrown by google in the ring.

Continuing the tradition, google has once again made a strong move by proving IMAP free to its Gmail users. This undoubtedly will ensure that others have to follow suit. IMAP was heartfelt need providing the much needed two way flow of information between “n” number of clients and the gmail servers.

I use Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 on my Vista Home premium edition running on a Core 2 Duo with 1.5GB RAM. To get IMAP going was a breeze. Put in your Username and Password and then the outlook much to my relief downloaded all the setting perfectly with no need to manually set port and all; unlike for POP3 access where you have to go to advanced tab to get the thing going. From that point, it took me almost 15 hours(couple of client restarts as gmail server kept knocking me out) to get the headers of my 39178 mails in my gmail account, all neatly arranged in the folders here as they were in labels there. Few things that i couldn’t help notice were:

• Gmail IMAP access is slow to the extent that at times the Microsoft Office Outlook keeps on preparing the requested view for a couple of minutes to change into a “not responding” entity.
• Outlook 2007 client only starts downloading the marked message when you leave you laptop alone, what i mean, that downloading marked messages is an idle actvity (lowest on priority) when your outlook is online and the internet access is at its minimum.
• Even when only outlook is working it doesnot use the full bandwidth avaliable.
• Every action you do on your client here gets a reaction (gets reflected) in your webmail, like you flag it here and it gets starred there.
• My outlook is continiously syncronizing folders in my mail account and my pst is already in order of 4GB, i think it reserves the space on the hard disk as per the size of the mail as described in headers.
• If i add a .pst here in a particular gmail account i will get the mails arranged under labels in webmail now thats extra cool, heheh, the two way highway

I will be writing about it more as i get used to Google IMAP experince ….