Use Windows Mail for Gmail IMAP or POP Access

Posted on January 23, 2008 at 9:52 am (PST)

IMAP SETUP

Now let’s setup IMAP. You should choose which protocol you want to use, IMAP or POP, but not both. There are differences. POP downloads a copy of the email to your computer. IMAP allows you to view email on the server without downloading it. Follow the instructions again at the start of the article to get to the setup wizard. Once the wizard starts choose IMAP, and setup imap.gmail.com and smtp.gmail.com as show below.

If asked to download the IMAP folders you can either say Yes, or you can wait until everything is configured, and then use Send and Receive to collect your Gmail. You’ll need to set the proper ports, shown below, or you’ll get an error.

Once your IMAP folders are displayed they’ll look like this. You can drag and drop email between folders, as well as create and delete folders.

Below is what an email looks like with IMAP. Looks just like the one with POP, except IMAP is only allow you to view it on the Gmail server, but POP actually downloads a copy. If you remove IMAP the email will disappear because the copy is on the Gmail server.

Once the wizard finishes you’ll see the General tab. You can change the label of your account to whatever you like. I used Gmail account POP. Don’t forget to fill in the Reply address, so recipients of you emails can hit reply and have your email already filled in.

Your Servers tab setting should look like the one below. Be sure the authentication tab is check, or you’ll get an error when sending mail.

Under the advanced tab be sure to set the SMTP and IMAP as you see below. The incoming port used for IMAP different from that used for POP. You may have noticed there is no Delivery section on this tab like you would see with POP. This is because Delivery is a setting that deals with email downloaded to your computer as in POP, but IMAP doesn’t download email it is only viewed on the remote server by you, so there is no need for the Delivery setting.

That’s it. Enjoy your remote access to Gmail.