Google equips Gmail with IMAP feature

Two months after increasing the storage space of its worldwide active Gmail, the Internet search giant Google has given e-mailers another reason to rejoice by offering them an IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) access within its Web-based free e-mail service Gmail.

Announcing the release of IMAP support in Gmail Wednesday at Interop New York, the product management director for Google Enterprise Matthew Glotzbach said that the company has equipped its free email service with IMAP feature, supporting a huge range of devices, including smartphones and PDAs as well as desktops and laptops.

Gmail account holders can begin using the IMAP option, enabled by default in their online account settings, to synchronize e-mail on their mobile devices supporting IMAP and desktops. The added feature makes the three-years-old e-mail service more useful for those users who access e-mail remotely.

The email clients that support IMAP include Outlook, Outlook Express, (Mac OS X) Mail, Entourage, Novell GroupWise, Eudora, Thunderbird 2.0 as well as the text-based UW PINE and Mutt.

And, the mobile devices that are compatible with IMAP include BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile based models. Palm's VersaMail currently does not support Gmail's IMAP feature.

The IMAP implementation enables user access his or her mail via the desktop client, read mail, make changes and have those changes visible by any other client accessing the account as the changes have been stored on a server.

If the user accesses his mail from multiple machines, the Internet Message Access Protocol allows them all to stay in sync, meaning changes done to emails on one device will also update on others. For example, if any user reads, sends, or deletes a message on an iPhone, it will appear in Gmail correctly.

"As we roll out the feature over the next couple of days, you will be able to use Gmail at work, in your car, or just about anywhere on any device, and actions you take will be automatically synced with Gmail on the web (and remember it works the other way too: anything you do on the Web will be seen on your phone or in your mail client)," said David Murray, Google’s associate product manager, in his official Gmail blog on Wednesday.

Google's Gmail was introduced in 2004, since then it has been using POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3) for e-mail access from cellphones and 3rd-party clients like Microsoft Outlook. This Internet standard is used for delivering e-mail from a server to an e-mail client on a personal computer.

POP3 and IMAP are the two common mailbox access protocols used for Internet e-mail. POP3 provides a message store that holds incoming e-mail until users log on and download it. It is a simple system with limited selectivity, while IMAP is often used in large networks and, compared to POP3, is a very complicated protocol.

On August, 10, Mountain View-based Google announced a major storage upgrade for its online e-mail service Gmail and Picasa users by increasing the storage limit from standard 1GB free storage for Picasa and 2.8GB for Gmail to up to 250GB of storage, which Google will offer for a fee.

Once a user reaches the standard limit of free storage, he/she would become eligible to buy additional storage, Google has said at the time. The additional storage space is available at a price of $20 per year for 2.8GB more space, while for the larger plans ranging up to 250GB space Google will charge $500 annually. Users can also buy even 25 GB of more space for $75 a year and 100 GB for $250 per year.