Outlook is a great program to manager calendars, RSS feeds, contacts, to-do lists, and email. There are two options for email, POP, or POP3, and IMAP. POP3 allows email to be downloaded to your local computer, and a copy left on the server, or deleted after downloading. Today we will setup IMAP in Outlook for use with Gmail. You could setup IMAP on one computer, and POP3 on another, while setting it to leave all messages on the server.

IMAP allows you to view your mail and mail folders on the remote Gmail from inside Outlook, and since you are only viewing the email it all remains on the Gmail servers for those times when you want to access your Gmail account from a different computer. There are a lot of Gmail features that are not available in Outlook, but the ones you really need are.

To setup IMAP in Outlook for use with Gmail you’ll need to first login to your Gmail account, and click Settings at the top right of the screen. Click the radio button next to Enable IMAP, and click Save. Now you’re ready to configure Outlook.

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Just three weeks ago Google Gmail had some major downtime, which Google explained as a huge load on their servers that was unexpected, and required the addition of more servers.

After logging into Gmail this morning I got the message:

Gmail is temporarily unable to access your Contacts. You may experience issues while this persists.

After reviewing the service dashboard the Google Mail status confirms the service disruption.

So far Google has given two status updates the first said:

“We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail, but we’ve provided a workaround below. We will provide an update by September 24, 2009 4:29:00 PM UTC+1 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. You can access Gmail via IMAP.”

The second update said:

“Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 1 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

The Gmail issue should now be resolved for most of our users. There still might be issues with your contacts. For Gmail users: Use www.google.com/contacts to access your contacts For Google Apps Customers: www.google.com/contacts/a/yourdomain-name.com”

We can understand how difficult it must be for a fast growing company like Google to scale their email system, but since they are also handling business email that uses company domain names as well, this sort of downtime is unacceptable. Google needs to stay way ahead of their server load.

Google has once again impressed Gmail fans by rolling out themes allowing users to "pimp their email." This isn’t anything drastically new, users have been able to accomplish this "unofficially" through the use of Greasemonkey scripts, but it wasn’t until recently that Gmail allowed for this customization natively.

Gmail users will be able to customize and give their inboxes a little facelift by going to Settings -> Themes. Google launched 30 themes including a retro notepad theme, a nature theme that changes scenery over time and a weather theme that changes according to your local weather.

Google, as usual, will be rolling out the update in ’phases,’ so if you don’t have the ’Themes’ tab yet, you definitely will by the end of the day. Until then, enjoy the screenshot!

Gmail has now allowed users to send text messages through it’s Gchat function. The option is experimental, so you’ll have to access it through the Labs tab inside of settings. Your messages will appear as a 406 number, and the rest of your number will solidify once you’ve sent your first text.

Many instant message services have offered this functionality for a while, so it’s nice that Google are on point as well.

GPhotospace is a windows-only extension for firefox that allows you to use some of your 7+ GB of storage provided by your Gmail account. The extension provides you a free, fast and secure way of uploading and sharing all your photos online.

They claim to batch upload up to 50 photos faster than any web-based uploader while giving you 100% control over privacy. You can also share your albums quickly and painlessly over email with GPhotospace’s integration with Gmail for autocompletion of email addresses.