A new IMAP feature has appeared in Gmail and mail for your domain accounts. This addition will make many people happy, and may even provide a real alternative to some people to host email, if Google’s privacy policies don’t put them off.

For those of you that don’t know what IMAP is, it is an alternative email protocol to POP (which Gmail already supports), which provides more redundancy and improved speed than POP. E.g. if you connect your Gmail account via IMAP to your mobile device, laptop, and home PC, any email’s sent, received, deleted e.t.c. will be reflected across all these devices. I.e. if you delete an email from your home PC, it will also delete from the other devices when they connect; If you reply to a message, it will be marked as replied on all mail clients. This of course includes the actual Gmail web interface.

No doubt the IMAP feature will be a popular one. But at the same time, for Google, this brings up the issue of Monetization. There is no way to display ads to IMAP users, unless in the messages themselves which would probably turn people back away from IMAP. And I know personally at least, I prefer my desktop mail client over any webmail interface - as long as there is also a webmail interface if required, e.g. on a guest computer or in case of SMTP authentication problems, which I experience frequently while traveling.

I only use my Gmail account for junk/non-important mail, but the addition of IMAP may make me use it a bit more for general online use for which I’m not too bothered about security or availability.

Via Download Squad