I’m incredibly excited that GMail now has IMAP.
Why? I’ve been a devoted GMail user since ’04 just after the launch and have gigs and gigs of emails and content locked up in GMail (bought extra storage to make due). While GMail has always allowed for POP downloads, IMAP is different.
Here’s why… with IMAP, you can have a more seamless email experience because IMAP allows you to sync your email where ever you access it from. So, for example you can interact with your email (read, label, etc) in Thunderbird or Outlook and see the changes in your GMail interface on the web. POP access doesn’t allow for this.
So, for those of us who prefer to keep webmail and offline mail nice and synced, this is a huge step forward for GMail.
There are even larger ramifications for people who have iPhones since the mail client there is heavily dependent on IMAP for sanity reasons.
Thank you, Google. You made my day.