I’m not the biggest fan of web mail, so couldn’t really rejoice when Yahoo! and the likes offered unlimited storage. Heck, I hardly ever log into Zimbra’s web mail interface, even though its a thing of beauty. But today, Gmail introduced IMAP capabilities.
Gmail and me have always had a love-hate relationship. I even have the Gmail Notifier plugin in Firefox, and still hardly ever read my email. This was a real problem when I had to deal with the Summer of Code Google Groups (which I just ended up setting a filter and pushing it to my real email account).
All that’s water under the bridge. I have 4GB of storage on Gmail, and its just growing (and if I needed more, ahem, I could cough up some cash). And now, it works via IMAP (for free). Ages ago, speaking to some Googlers, I was told that the idea of IMAP is hard to implement because tags aren’t folders. I see they’ve fixed said bug, and am totally stoked. I’m now happy to read Gmail in Thunderbird, and will be using it a lot more.
Lock-in? Google knows more about me now? Sure. But now I’m spoilt for choice – reading Gmail via my Series 60 phone (their client is pretty swanky), reading it via IMAP in Thunderbird, and if required, via the web (ick).
On a rather ironic note, I use Yahoo! for search, not Google.
Technorati Tags: web, gmail, imap, googlemail