Turn Thunderbird into the Ultimate Gmail IMAP Client
Gmail’s IMAP support roll-out this week had nerds all atwitter about the possibility of synchronized email access across devices, computers, and clients. IMAP is far superior to regular old POP for fetching your messages and maintaining your folder list whether you’re on your iPhone, office or home computer. If IMAP’s got you curious but you’re not sure what desktop application to use with Gmail, consider the extensible, fast, cross-platform and free Mozilla Thunderbird, our beloved Firefox’s little sibling. Here’s how to get the full Gmail experience in Thunderbird with IMAP.
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Why is IMAP better than POP?
POP downloads and copies new messages to your local inbox. With POP you can download once and disconnect from the server, which is its one advantage. But you cannot download messages that have already been archived and labeled in Gmail via POP, and your client has to poll the server to get new messages. With POP access, if you move a message to a folder or star it in your desktop client, that change is not reflected in Gmail and your messages get out of sync. Any rules or mail filters you set up on one machine with a POP client have to be set up and reprocessed with a fresh download on all your other machines.
Think of POP as copying files from a server to your computer and working with them on your hard drive. Think of IMAP as connecting to a remote server and working with the files saved there.
