Gmail gets IMAP
It appears that Google is working on integrating IMAP into Gmail. Download Squad reader eD! Thomas sent in a tip letting us know he came across the new IMAP setting while snooping around Gmail. However, it is only appearing in select few Gmail and Google Apps for domains accounts at the moment.
Context & Ripple Effects
A Download Squad reader tip surfaced a hidden IMAP setting in a handful of Gmail and Google Apps for Domains accounts, and the discovery traveled unusually fast: within roughly a day it had been picked up by The Register — which framed it as shaking IMAP 'out of coma' — by the Google-watching blogs Google Operating System and Google Blogoscoped, and by Google itself, which confirmed free IMAP was rolling out.
What made the news land was the use case the community immediately built around it: the first wave of follow-up posts were setup guides for Apple Mail and the iPhone, i.e., keeping one inbox in sync across a desktop client and a handheld rather than downloading copies over POP. It arrives during a bruising October for Google's image — a feature asking whether users' secrets are safe with the company ran two days earlier, right after the Jaiku acquisition stoked fresh privacy worries.
First-order effects
- Users who see the setting gain true two-way sync between the Gmail web inbox and standard clients — Apple Mail being the case the early how-tos target — instead of POP's one-way copy-and-delete dance.
- Google takes on the server cost of persistent IMAP connections for free accounts, directly answering the lock-in criticism running through the same week's 'Big Brother' coverage of its data collection.
Second-order effects
- Mobile devices become first-class Gmail endpoints overnight: the immediate community response was iPhone and Apple Mail configuration guides, showing demand is for the server-synced inbox on whatever screen is at hand, not for the web UI alone.
- For Google Apps, IMAP removes a practical objection for IT buyers standardizing on desktop clients, since domain accounts now behave like conventional hosted IMAP mailboxes rather than a webmail island.
Third-order effects
- If free consumer webmail keeps absorbing the open protocols that defined desktop email, the canonical inbox migrates to the provider's servers, with IMAP as the interchange layer — competition shifts from owning the client to holding the account.
- Opening a standard access channel into Google-held mail also widens the surface where third-party software touches personal data, giving the portability-versus-surveillance debate a concrete technical battleground.
The trend: Webmail is absorbing the open protocols that once belonged to desktop email, turning the provider's servers into the canonical inbox that any client — web, desktop, or phone — syncs against.