Sunday, November 04, 2007

IMAP for Gmail now works for everybody

You might have heard about the rumor: Gmail now supports IMAP. Why IMAP? Quoting Gmail Help Center:
IMAP offers two-way communication between your web Gmail and your email client(s). This means when you log in to Gmail using a web browser, actions you perform on email clients and mobile devices (ex: putting mail in a 'work' folder) will instantly and automatically appear in Gmail (ex: it will already have a 'work' label on that email).
This feature is useless if you only access Gmail from your browser, but it's a WOW for those who frequently access it using some e-mail client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc).

You might also have heard that IMAP support is not for everybody (because Google changes Gmail in waves). There has been some tricks over the net such as logging out and logging back in to activate the IMAP. The success factor for those tricks is unknown.

I'm one of those unfortunate souls, I still don't have IMAP option in my "Settings" page. BUT I manage to make my e-mail client (I'm using Thunderbird 2.0) communicate to Gmail through IMAP, without any hack.

How? If you follow the instructions, you will be told to enable IMAP in your Gmail account and, once IMAP is enabled, follow the configuration instructions for your client of choice. If there's no "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" option in your "Settings" page, don't quit! Continue working on the client configuration instead.

It worked for me. It should work for you too (I still don't have IMAP option in my "Settings" page).

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