I have to admit that I was wrong about reMail. When I wrote about version 1.0, I assumed that nobody would have a problem trusting reMail's secure servers to store and index their email messages for faster searching, and that nobody wanted to download an entire Gmail archive to an iPhone. Wrong, and wrong again. However, version 2.0 of reMail addresses these issues by eliminating the need to trust reMail with your email passwords and letting you carry your whole email account in your pocket.

On another positive note, reMail is getting rid of its subscription fee and charging a flat fee of $4.99 for the app. Before you pay that 5 bucks, you'll probably want to know what reMail does that the combination of Apple's built-in Mail app and Gmail's mobile version doesn't do. Aside from the ability to download your archive (attachments included), you get full-text search instead of just subject lines, and search speeds that are reportedly 5 times faster than the other options.

If you've got a ton of email that you need to dig through very efficiently, the iPhone's built-in Mail app might not be adequate to the task. That's where reMail comes in.

It's a dedicated email search app that connects to your IMAP account to find the message you're looking for. ReMail's featureset is impressive, with an offline mode, autocompletion for your contacts' names, and a very sensible natural language approach to search queries.

Although reMail doesn't support Exchange, it does support any IMAP account -- multiple IMAP accounts, in fact -- which means it works well with Gmail. The only hangup is that reMail provides a lot of its features by indexing your email on its own servers, which means you have to trust them. you didn't expect your iPhone to hold your whole Gmail archive, right?

The reMail privacy policy seems straightforward enough, though, so there's no reason to think they're not on the level. The app is free, and the service is free during beta, but will go up to $3.99 a month after launch.

Gmail has been supporting IMAP for almost exactly a year now, and they're celebrating by fixing the only thing I don't like about it! One of the latest brilliant ideas to come out of Google Labs is an advanced IMAP controls option that lets you mark messages for deletion without actually deleting them, and send your deleted messages to the trash instead of archiving them, Most importantly, you can hide individual Gmail mailboxes from your IMAP mail client. That sounds like a picky thing, and not really a big deal, but it's actually huge for me.

You may have noticed that Gmail has a mailbox called All Mail, that does exactly what it says -- it keeps copies of all your mail. This is fine if you're using webmail; you don't have to look at it, but it's there when you need it. If you're using an IMAP client, though, those extra copies of every last message in your account get synced to your computer all the time. Why bother downloading an email message twice, especially if you've got an overflowing inbox?

The thing is, now you don't have to. Turn on the advanced settings by going to "settings" and then "Labs" in Gmail. Once you enable the option, go back to settings and go to labels. All it takes is one checkbox, and All Mail will leave your email client alone. Brilliant. Of course, there might be a good reason for wanting to sync All Mail ... I just haven't found it yet. So thanks, Google, for fixing one of my pet peeves!

Have you got an iPhone and a Gmail account? If so, you're probably using IMAP, and you may not even realize it. What's IMAP? It's an email protocol that has been around for many years, but is not nearly as well known as its counterpart, POP.

First, the definitions:

POP, or POP3: Post Office Protocol 3, the most commonly used email protocol for retrieving remote email to a local client over a TCP/IP connection.

IMAP, or IMAP4: Internet Message Access Protocol, an email protocol for accessing email on a remote server using a local client over a TCP/IP connection.

While the two definitions seem very similar, take note of the difference. POP is used for retrieving email to the local client, whereas IMAP is used to access email located on a remote server.

When you use POP, your email comes in to you local client, and typically the remote version is purged. There is no concept of multiple clients having identical synchronized versions of your inbox and email folders.

When you use IMAP, your email actually lives on a remote server, and is not purged. You can access it with a local client, which downloads a copy of your messages, and synchronizes the contents of your local mail store to that of the server's. Changes that you make locally are reflected on the server, and if you wanted to you could connect with another device or email client that is capable of IMAP, and you will see exactly the same thing - all of your messages in your inbox and other folders will reflect exactly what is on the server.

Sounds pretty great, right? Well, yes. Most of us probably have some hardcore geek friend that has been extolling the virtues of IMAP for years, only to have it fall on deaf ears. Most of us have either never had the need for such synchronization, or have not had an IMAP capable mail provider.

If you've got a hankerin' for Gmail over IMAP bliss using Mozilla Thunderbird as your mail client, we can show you how. This sub 4 minute video walks you through configuring Thunderbird to stay synced with your Gmail account.

If you've been waiting impatiently for Google to roll out IMAP support for your account, it looks like the wait is over. Just two weeks after the first users started to notice a new IMAP option in their Gmail settings, Google says all Gmail users now have access to IMAP.

You'll need to use the English interface in order to see your IMAP settings. But Google plans to add the option to all languages in the next few weeks.

Why does IMAP matter again? Because unlike POP, IMAP supports back and forth communication between your offline email client and Gmail. If you set up your iPhone, Outlook, or Thunderbird client to read your Gmail using IMAP, every time you read a message it will be marked as read on the web interface. If you delete a message on your desktop, it will be deleted from the web. If you use POP, you'll have to repeat all of those actions twice.

Leopard, Gmail, IMAP, Facebook, and Digg. If you know what at least four out of five of these things are, you can probably skip the rest of this article. If not, it's time to catch up on some of what you've missed this week. That's right, it's time for another fabulous edition of Download Squad's Week in Review.

Gmail Gets IMAP
Some people have been waiting for years for one thing: IMAP support in Gmail. Now it's finally here. That means full synchronization between Gmail and third party e-mail clients, including Outlook, Thunderbird, and even an iPhone. Delete a message in Outlook and it'll disappear from your Gmail web interface as well. Not everyone has access to this feature yet, so keep checking the settings tab in your Gmail account to see if it's been enabled.

Some Gmail users are waking up this morning to a pleasant surprise: IMAP support. We first dug up some dirt on the IMAP-ey goodness last night. But it appears to be a phased rollout. Many users still aren't finding IMAP in their GMail settings.

Now Google is confirming that IMAP support is making the rounds. If you don't see it in your Gmail settings today, keep checking back, as the company is rolling the feature out to users "as fast as [they] can."

Google has also written up a few details about IMAP on the "What's new on Gmail" page. And there's even a handy little video showing how to use IMAP to synchronize Gmail with your iPhone.

It appears that Google is working on integrating IMAP into Gmail. Download Squad reader eD! Thomas sent in a tip letting us know he came across the new IMAP setting while snooping around Gmail. However, it is only appearing in select few Gmail and Google Apps for domains accounts at the moment.

When we checked Gmail Help database this evening, Gmail had said that they support POP, but not IMAP. Then a few minutes later, that doc was gone, and a stack of IMAP related help docs were up. The new pages explain how to integrate the new mail feature. It's as easy as setting up POP, but with huge benefits.

Why is IMAP integration a good thing for Gmail? POP was a stepping stone, but IMAP pushes Gmails benefits over the top. With IMAP, users can now access their email via a desktop application like Outlook or Thunderbird, read emails, make changes, delete, and have the changes made across platforms. So if you now log into your Gmail account, the message which you read in Thunderbird, will now be marked accordingly. No more wasting time trying to sift through emails that had already been answered.

Take a peek under your Settings in Gmail, and click into your 'Forwarding and POP IMAP' tab to see if you are one of the lucky ones who got IMAP first.

UPDATE: Some users are reporting that if they log out and back into Gmail accounts, IMAP settings are showing up! There is hope!

UPDATE 2: Dont worry if you IMAP isn't appearing in your account, Google will be rolling it out to everyone over the next few days.

Checking multiple accounts is just a fact of life for many users. Log into a Yahoo account, then switch over to Gmail, then off to Facebook. Fuser aims to make things a little easier.

With Fuser, users can check multiple email accounts and social networks from one place and with one interface. Emails can be pulled in, read and replied to from popular email apps like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and SquirrelMail as well as POP and IMAP emails and such social networks as MySpace and Facebook with a single login.

There is no limit to the number of email and social network accounts you tie into Fuser. All emails can be sent to one inbox, or the application can be set up so that incoming mail can be better organized through folders. As for security, Fuser does not store any of your emails. It simply views them. So if you delete an email from your regular email account, it is deleted in Fuser. All information is stored in encrypted databases, including passwords, usernames and any information that is transmitted.

Fuser is a great way to streamline emails, and a real timesaver if you find yourself switching between a number of locations.

[via TechCrunch]

While the iPhone's place in the business world is an evolving story, Synchronica has added their own chapter by shipping v3.0 of their Mobile Gateway service, adding support for Apple's shiny new phone to synchronize email with Microsoft Exchange. This could allow many a corporate user to finally justify that iPhone purchase to their boss, now that they can both send and receive email on it without needing to install software or being behind a firewall. Speaking of security, messages are sent over encrypted IMAP/SMTP and secure HTTPS connections to the Microsoft Exchange server, so it sounds like things are locked down pretty tightly.

Synchronica's iPhone-enabled service is available now with a 60-day free trial, though the demo signup page explains that the company has apparently been bowled over with requests since announcing iPhone Exchange compatibility. If you're still interested in exploring your chances of getting the boss to add an iPhone to the company's expense account, you can sign up to be notified when normal service resumes and you can get in on the action.

[via PC World]

In today's multi-device, always-connected world, one has to wonder how loud the call for Gmail to do IMAP has to get before Google pulls their head out of their ass server room and flips the switch. Our trick for using Gmail over IMAP might not be an easy 1-2 setup but it definitely works well. If you're looking for an easier method to simply allow multiple email clients to download your Gmail, however, UneasySilence has highlighted an unsung Gmail feature that should do the trick. Simply adding a 'recent:' prefix to your login credentials (i.e. - recent:user@gmail.com) in any of your secondary POP clients will allow that client to download up to the last 30 days of mail, regardless of whether you've already downloaded it. For those who would like to check their Gmail on a mobile device in addition to a desktop client, this is definitely a great trick to have, but it certainly isn't a replacement for IMAP as UneasySilence seems to be indirectly stating. For example: when checking messages over IMAP, you can use Client A (for the sake of discussion) to read a few messages, delete a few, maybe move some into folders or tag them using the plug-ins we mentioned. Across all your other email clients - including mobile phones - those messages will appear as read, deleted or filed away, with no further effort on your part. This is the beauty of IMAP and one of the many reasons why so many Gmail enthusiasts - widely known to be early adopters and power users - are clamoring for Google to join the rest of us in the 21st century by providing IMAP in addition to POP. Heck, even a nominal fee for IMAP wouldn't be out of the question.

So how about it Google? While spending all that time trying to make it easier to find and manage information, are you listening to how your customers would like to be able to manage their mail?

I've been a user of Gmail since late 2005 and have loved just about every minute of it. The revolutionary webmail interface, the vast popularity among power users and plethora of scripts, add-ons and doodads - but the one thing that always bothered me was the loss of integration with the rest of my computing. Sure, there are some great tricks and bookmarklets we found for our Top 10 Gmail tips and hacks post, but I've missed real integration with Mac OS X apps like iSale that can show me emails related to an auction I created with it, iPhoto that can compress copies of 20 images and attach them to a new message and even simply double-clicking a .VCF I've downloaded to quickly add it to Address Book and keep on working. Heck, toss in a dash of Automator and I really find myself longing for a desktop email client and the synchronized wonders of IMAP.

Thus began my journey to figure out some sort of a hack or workaround for using Gmail over IMAP with my preferred and well-integrated desktop email client, Apple Mail. It wasn't too difficult, but the setup requires your own web host who offers IMAP email that can scale up to around 2GB or more (for example: I already pay for hosting at DreamHost which offers IMAP with every account, but some companies offer free IMAP, and other hosting companies offer flexible solutions as well) and a little bit of incoming/outgoing server trickery. Another necessity is some sort of tool or plug-in to enable one of Gmail's most well-known features: tagging, otherwise known as labels. While Thunderbird is probably the first fairly mainstream email client to do tagging out of the box, it drops the ball on my need for integration; it doesn't support Apple's built-in Address Book (which so many other apps do), and it doesn't plug into all the other handy tools that allow so many of Mac OS X's 3rd party apps move data from one to another so effortlessly. For what it's worth, I also found a plug-in for Outlook on Windows called Taglocity that should get the job done, though I can't test it because I don't own Office. That said, all my setup instructions are written using Apple Mail, but you should be able to apply them to any IMAP-capable desktop email client and tagging plug-ins you find. As a bonus, this trick will also work for mobile devices that support IMAP, including Windows Mobile, BlackBerries and, of course, your shiny new iPhone. Following is my 7-step trick for using Gmail over IMAP, leveraging the power of desktop software while bringing the innovation of Gmail's tagging and conversations along for the ride.

Consilient wants to push your email. Should we forget about Blackberry's and try out Consilient's new push mobile email application? This former partner of RIM looks like it has the inside scoop on push technology with this new offering that was built for the Asian market, and has recently traveled to North American soil.

Consilient's free push offering includes access to five email accounts, including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, along with IMAP and POP accounts. The company states that they do not store passwords and the free application will push out emails in real time as they are received into personal and corporate email accounts that have been setup in the application. The push application is available for most popular phones and Windows Mobile devices, and does have the ability to accept attachments in Word, PDF and Excel formats.

For users wishing to upgrade from the free account, a $5/month (plus a $10 activation fee) plan is available that will unlock enhanced features that allow content sharing and mobile social networking.

Google's darling Gmail has just launched a new feature they're slowly rolling out to users: POP checking of other accounts. If you're one of the lucky few, under the Accounts tab in Gmail's settings, you can now add up to 5 other accounts (if they have POP3 access enabled) for Gmail to pull email from.

Of course, you've always been able to forward email from most other accounts to Gmail, but the significance here is that by enabling Gmail to check your other accounts, it can grab virtually all the mail you've ever received in those accounts (if you haven't taken it all off the server with a desktop client, that is - not just the messages *after* you turned on forwarding.

While this is certainly a great new feature, I must again echo the requests of many by asking: why on earth Google hasn't joined the rest of us in the 21st century by adding IMAP access? Considering the plethora of devices consumers are using (desktops, public terminals, phones and PDAs) and the multiple ways they have already offered for accessing Gmail (web, WAP, mobile client, etc.). Is IMAP that much more difficult or expensive to implement? I realize their intention is to keep you doing email the Gmail way - labels, web ads and all - but I still say its time to grant usable access to those who need the power of desktop software and tools for their emailing needs.

[via digg]