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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The Google free email service Gmail has grown exponentially in popularity since it was first launched, and one reason for this is the ability to use Gmail any way you want. Gmail allows you to stay organized by giving you the ability to collect your email alongside any other email service using programs like Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Eudora, Netscape Mail, Thunderbird, iPhone, and more through the use of POP or IMAP. There are some differences between POP and IMAP. POP allows you to remotely download mail from a remote server, and after downloading it your program, i.e. Outlook, can delete the mail on the remote server, or it can leave the mail on the server for a specified period of time. IMAP allows your program, i.e. Outlook, to remotely view your mail and the mail folders located on a remote server, drag and drop between folders, etc. IMAP is just a way to remote view your email and folders on the remote server, and does not download the emails, for that you’d need to use POP if you want a permanent copy.

Before you can setup your email client for POP or IMAP you’ll first need to configure your Gmail account settings to allow those protocols to be used. Click here to login to Gmail, then click on Settings in the top right corner.

Click on the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.

Enable both POP and IMAP. For POP you have several choices. I set it to Enable POP for all mail.

After enabling POP you’ll need to choose how you want Gmail to store your email, since you won’t be visiting Gmail much from now on. I selected keep Gmail’s copy in the Inbox. If you use POP you might set it to delete the mail after your email client downloads it, and if you’re using IMAP you can manage all you email as if you were logged in with Internet Explorer by dragging and dropping mail to another folder if you want. You can always change these settings later to suit how you want to keep your mail organinzed.

Now Save Changes. If you go back to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab you’ll notice the Status: POP is enabled for all mail that has arrived since a specified date.

Now Gmail is ready to receive POP and IMAP requests from your email client. Don’t worry about filling up your account since Gmail currently offers 6.337 GB of account space, which increases regularly. This sure beats the 5 MB of email account space provided back when the web was first born.