IMAP comes to Gmail

I’m having a nerd-moment.

As many of you know, I use Gmail as my primary e-mail address. It was somewhat reluctantly — I’ve used every version of Outlook since it debuted in 1997 — and Gmail’s web interface just paled in comparison to what I was used to doing in Outlook. But I needed two things that my old insightbb.com account just wasn’t offering me: 1) portability and 2) effective spam blocking. Gmail offered both, so I sold out my need for Outlook’s features. That was in 2004.

Fast forward to October 24, 2007. Google announced today that they would start rolling out IMAP capabilities to their Gmail accounts. Why is this a big deal? I mean, Gmail has offered POP3 access for a while.

If you rememeber back from your CompTIA Network+ class (you do remember that, right?), IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol and works as an e-mail messaging protocol. Simply put, it’s one of the ways we can acccess our e-mail accounts. The other ways are via the web (http) and POP3. POP3 has been the most popular, but it has its drawbacks. The main one for me is that to use POP3, you have to actually download your e-mail off of the mail server down to your client machine. For most people, that’s fine, but I find myself on as many as four different clients during any given week. Which means that once I read an e-mail at say, work, I won’t be able to look at that e-mail anywhere else other than work! That’s been the main reason I’ve had to abandon Outlook as a mail client and use G-mail’s web interface instead. But now, now, grasshoppers, Gmail offers IMAP too…

So, so what? The big deal is that Outlook is an IMAP client as well! And when setup to use IMAP, Outlook won’t be downloading my messages off of Gmail onto whatever client machine I’m using. Outlook instead will be channeling Gmail on the web and showing me my messages while staying connected to the Gmail server. I can use four different installations of Outlook to access the same web information.

Hopefully the calendar will sync up as well.