After a long wait, Google has enabled the IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) support for gmail. Till now, it was POP3 only for external access. The introduction of IMAP will be a good news for users as it has several advantages over the traditional POP3.

With IMAP, users can now access the email through Desktop applications like outlook, thunderbird and all actions that are performed on the email like reading, deleting are synced between the clients and the server. So now if you log into Gmail through the web interface, all the changes which you have made to your mail through an external client like Outlook will be visible. To enable this feature, just look under settings in Gmail and select the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.

Google is offering the IMAP feature to selected accounts right now. Over the next few days it is going to be rolled out to everyone. Good Job Google , you just made my day.