Yes folks, the team in charge of Google’s Gmail just announced their popular email service will now support the IMAP protocol.

This will allow Gmail users to send and receive mail directly through traditional mail applications, such as Outlook, Apple Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Yes, I know, Gmail already supports POP, so why should you change your local mail application settings to use IMAP? The answer is simple: Unlike POP, IMAP offers bidirectional communications between the local and the remote mail clients, so if you delete a message in Thunderbird, then go on vacation and log in to your Gmail account via a Web browser, the action you accomplished at home will reflect inside the web interface.

Most users do not have access to this new feature yet, but it shouldn’t be very long until it becomes available for everybody.

Getting started with IMAP for Gmail