This morning Google announced availability of IMAP for Gmail, which lets the free email service work much better with desktop (e.g., Mail.app) and mobile (e.g., iPhone) email clients.
This is great news for those of us who love the excellent spam filtering, huge storage space, and web access of Gmail but also depend on the rich user experience, rules, folders, and multiple account support of email clients like Mail.app.
It also makes life much easier for those of us who use multiple devices to access their email—like a Mac and an iPhone.
Now my Mail.app mail will be kept in sync with Gmail, just like my iCal calendars are kept in sync with Google Calendar by Spanning Sync. Nice!
I'd like to point out that this combination of desktop software plus online services is exactly what Microsoft is doing with Office and Office Live Workspace, the document-sharing service that was so roundly derided by the Web 2.0 pundits. Face it, guys. Web apps alone only get you so far. Even Google knows that.
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