IMAP is something which I never really knew about, for some reason I just assumed that it was some old technology, and that POP had taken it’s place. Probably due to the fact that Gmail offered POP + SMTP, as did most other email providers that i’ve used in the past.
I never did like using POP to access my email, so for the last year or so i’ve solely been using webmail, as I’d download all my email into some application, it’d take forever, everything would be”unread” and then for some reason or another I had to reinstall the OS, same process again, it was just missing out the synchronization. Then google announce IMAP was being released for gmail. At first I ignored it, since I didn’t really know what it did, but then I read more about it and it seemed perfect, I could use Thunderbird/Outlook for email, and it wouldn’t keep me out of sync with whats read & whats not. So yesterday I setup Outlook 2007 to use it, and it worked. Perfectly. All mail was read, excepty for a couple new ones, I read them and that was updated at gmail. Excellent! My only problem now is that I don’t know how to use outlook, and manage to keep sending messages twice.