Google wises up, give Gmail users IMAP access

There's the way to stick it to Yahoo.

Google surprised me by slowly rolling out the IMAP e-mail protocol for users of its Gmail service. Since Web-based e-mail clients are basically front-ends for IMAP-style e-mail access, it only makes sense to allow users of your Web e-mail portal to check their mail from ... any mail client they wish without resorting to the use of the POP protocol, which downloads all the mail to the hard drive of the computer on which you are using the stand-alone mail client.

Back in the days of dialup and small amounts of disk space, POP made sense -- you didn't want your phone line tied up, and you were always hitting your storage limit, so POP-ing your mail down to your own PC made sense.

But now, with always-on broadband, free mailboxes offering 2 GB and more of space, and with just about everybody needing to read their mail on multiple PCs (I use between three and six in any given week), the iPhone, Palm handhelds (including Treos) and more, IMAP -- in which mail stays on the server and can be accessed by multiple apps on multiple devices at multiple times -- is the only way to go.

Since Yahoo Mail charges for POP service and doesn't even offer IMAP, Google's move to IMAP (they already have free POP access) cements them as the go-to free mail provider.

So if you already use Outlook (or Thunderbird, Evolution, Sylpheed or what have you), once you go IMAP, you never go back.

Update: My Gmail account does not currently have IMAP capability.

Another contender: AOL -- remember them? -- offers both POP and IMAP access to its free mail service. And if you have an AIM account, you're already signed up. Along with the best-in-class Xdrive online storage service, it makes AOL more of a contender than you might realize.