So Google has decided to be a pioneer, again, and give away free IMAP support for your equally free GMail account. Why is this a big deal? Organization is easier with IMAP support because all of your tagged emails will convert into folders made from those tags, and your emails will be sorted into those folders, making it easier, and quicker, to find what you are looking for.

How does this pertain to the iPhone? The iPhone is one of the few mobile devices out there with IMAP support, so, it will be a lot nicer, and a lot more organized when you peer into your inbox if you have been using GMail and tagging your emails.

Oh, there is another, really big, upside to using IMAP, any changes you make, like say you read an email, it will show as read, regardless of where you actually read it, on the web, on your iPhone, on your work computer, its all global and all changes replicate throughout the system. The only downsides are, it seems to be a bit of a pain in the ass to set up. However, if you are feeling adventurous, they are rolling out the IMAP support to all accounts, but its taking some time because IMAP is more resource hungry than POP, so it wasn’t they could flip a switch on, so, if you don’t have the IMAP option, in the same location where you’d find the POP settings, just wait, and keep checking, they’ll get to you eventually.

Changing the Game – Gmail Gets IMAP [via paulstamatiou]