Gmail has IMAP

Apparently you can now enable IMAP for your Gmail account! This makes it a lot more suitable for use on an iPhone (as an IMAP client essentially mirrors the server, rather than extracting the messages).

The one drawback seems to be that if a message is assigned multiple labels in Gmail, it ends up in multiple folders in your IMAP client — taking up extra disk space on your hard drive (or flash memory in the case of iPhone). I think I’ll be removing a label or two…

Enable IMAP under Settings, then follow the directions for your client. (I set it up in Apple Mail, then synched to my iPhone. It seemed to default to SSL, which didn’t quite match the instructions, but was what I wanted.)