IMAP for Gmail and your Mac or iPhone

If you check your email from multiple machines you want to be using IMAP rather than POP to be doing it. Unlike POP, IMAP is a two way system so whatever you do on your device is reflected on the server. Also, if you’re like me and you’ve been archiving all your mail for years with Gmail and then got an iPhone and realized it wanted to download thousands of messages, you want to use IMAP.

I use Gmail (and Google Apps for my own domain names) for email. I check my email from my home computer, my iPhone, and two different machines at work. I have the Mail application on my MacBook Pro at home set to check my accounts via IMAP, my iPhone set to check my accounts via IMAP, and I use the gmail.com interface to check my email at work so that I can keep my personal things separate from my work things.

IMAP is great because whatever action you take on a particular message on any machine is reflected on all of the others. If I delete a message out of my inbox on my iPhone it’s archived on Gmail.com.

There are a few simple steps to setting up IMAP for Gmail: