Filed under: Internet Tools
Gmail flips the switch on IMAP support
Our country cousins at Download Squad have picked up the scent of a major change over Gmail way: support for IMAP access to Google's multigigabyte free email service appears to be up and running as of tonight (possibly not yet turned on for all accounts; check your settings to be sure). What this means for Mac users: better support for Gmail within Mail.app, Thunderbird and Entourage. For iPhone users: a way better Gmail experience over the previous POP or web client approaches -- Gmail has even posted handy setup instructions for you. First step: Don't choose the Gmail setup button, choose "Other..." instead. (Yes, they know, they're working on it.)
If you use Gmail and want to fire it up in IMAP on your iPhone, by all means let us know how it goes.
Thanks Chris

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Reader Comments (Page 2 of 6)
Leonard Nimrod said 10:56PM on 10-23-2007
I think we can expect IMAP PUSH coming too.
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Ben Englert said 10:56PM on 10-23-2007
Patience, children. The nodes in the big Google neural cloud do not all agree about this IMAP fellow just yet. Don't worry, though, support for him is spreading throughout the community.
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Sam said 10:57PM on 10-23-2007
IMAP FTW!!!!!
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Matt said 10:59PM on 10-23-2007
works great for me, i love even having access to my tag "folders". i noticed that sending mail from the phone saves the msg to the iphone's sent folder by default. i wonder if gmail will automatically save a copy or if people who want their mail should change this.
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Charles Barilleaux said 11:04PM on 10-23-2007
Woot! We get the IMAP
not-so-Woot!: It hasn't hit my account yet. Any of them.
Oh well. There is hope, at least.
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Jon P said 11:07PM on 10-23-2007
It works really well - labels show up as folders on both OSX mail and in the iphone - when you move mail to a folder it's automatically archived and given that folder's label. Couldn't be better!
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Jimbo said 11:07PM on 10-23-2007
Yep, I got it. Now, do I delete my POP account? What do I do?
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Dave said 11:09PM on 10-23-2007
FYI I had to logout and login to get the IMAP settings.
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Matt said 11:10PM on 10-23-2007
Mine is all setup, just waiting for Google to tell us it's Push!
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Frank said 11:12PM on 10-23-2007
Yep got it. Works beautiful ... all 40+ tags I have are showing up as folders. I think I'm in love.
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Paul S. said 11:14PM on 10-23-2007
Sweet! I've been waiting for this ever since I discovered how great IMAP was when I set up Mail to sync my college mail account!
Luckily, my single account has the feature already, though Mail is going quite slow with it at the moment. Maybe it's just because it has to sort through all this new mail, or maybe they're still working out the kinks over at Google HQ.
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Ryan Schmidt said 11:15PM on 10-23-2007
Works SO great. It lists all the tags as folders on the phone and you can move them. WOW. Soooo nice. I have been craving IMAP Gmail support since the day I got this phone. My dream has come true.
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Joe Maller said 11:33PM on 10-23-2007
What I really, really want is GMail as an IMAP client. When they enable that, it will be the end of spam as we know it.
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Jerry said 11:22PM on 10-23-2007
yay works for me
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Gassia said 11:23PM on 10-23-2007
At least it works flawlessly on my iPhone :)
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MacBookOwner said 11:24PM on 10-23-2007
OK, I'm a bit new to the IMAP thing when it comes to online mail like Gmail-what is the big advantage to reconfiguring my current POP Gmail account to IMAP? (My Gmail account has IMAP in the preferences now)
I'm all for switching if there is a great reason to...just dreading the redownloading of email again (since iPhone's mail delete message system blows)
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Rob said 11:28PM on 10-23-2007
Have set up IMAP - quite cool, especially the downloading of various Gmail folders (labels). I don't know if this is the "IMAP-Push" that Yahoo does... which is supposedly like the blackberry e-mail service. Anybody know if Yahoo's IMAP-Push is similar to blackberry's push, and if Gmail's IMAP follows suit?
It's about time Gmail caught up... been waiting on this for a while.
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Zombie Flanders said 11:29PM on 10-23-2007
my [Gmail] folder gave me an error and doesn't seem to be or do anything, but it's so nice to not get my own sent emails in the inbox anymore! Push, let's get it on!
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Jonathan Tyler said 11:40PM on 10-23-2007
Um.
You guys heard of Izymail.com? I don't know if that's been brought up here or not but I use this for my hotmail and it works on my iPod Touch just fine. :>
Unless there's some dark secret as to why no one uses it... Hm.
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Paul said 11:42PM on 10-23-2007
At long last! No more convoluted routes to getting Gmail sourced IMAP mail onto my iPhone ....
Configured Mail.app and iPhone Mail and it's now working sweet! Thankyou Google!!!!!!
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