Many people are looking forward to Outlook 2010, but few are reluctant to give it a try. The reason keeping them back is IMAP support for Gmail and other web services. In Outlook 2007 if you try setting up Gmail IMAP, you will find it to be clunky, slow, or in other words useless.
For those who don’t know IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is far better than POP since it allows users to download all their emails as if they are residing locally. In other words, unlike POP, IMAP is a two way communication. If you move your email to a folder titled ‘Work’ in Outlook 2010, you will it find the email in Work folder when you login directly to Gmail via a web browser.
Microsoft has made it dead-simple to add a new account in Outlook 2010 and when you add a Gmail account, Windows Live account, or any other account, IMAP is automatically configured.
Note: IMAP must be enabled from inside Gmail, Windows Live, or any other web service otherwise it won’t work.
So how is IMAP in Outlook 2010? After using it for a day, moving and organizing my Gmail emails, I have to say that it works seamlessly without any problems. If you are one of those users who ditched Outlook 2007 due to lack of IMAP support, Outlook 2010 will steal you back.







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Is offline mode supposed to allow the moving of emails between folders? Even when I set Outlook 2010 to offline mode, it says it needs a server connection when I try to move emails around. I can compose new emails and they’re of course held in the Outbox, but I can’t file anything.