For a while now, new Gmail users have been able to import messages and contacts from email accounts on other services like Yahoo or Hotmail. If you had an older Gmail account, though, you were left out in the cold with no import tool. Now the Gmail team is solving that problem by making importing available to everyone.

You can find the option to import in your Gmail settings, under "Accounts and Import." One caveat: Google says it can take up to a week to import all the mail from your old account. If you're worried about people still using your old address, you can have it forward to Gmail for 30 days. After that, you should be fully ready to ditch your old account and enjoy your shiny new gmail.

While a number of free webmail services including Gmail offers users POP3 or IMAP access for use with an external mail applications like Outlook or Thunderbird, Yahoo! considers this a premium feature and requires you to pony up $20 a year for POP3 access. Paying customers also get some other nifty features like an ad-free interface. But if you just want to use Outlook to send and receive email, YPOPs! can help.

YPOPs! is a free and open source application that provides POP3 and SMTP access to free Yahoo! Mail accounts. it does this by basically setting up a server on your desktop. The program acts like a go-between that lets Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Opera, or other mail applications talk to the Yahoo! Mail server. It does this by communicating with the server using HTTP and then setting up a POP3 server on your desktop to talk to your email application. As such, it's not technically a violation of Yahoo!'s terms of service. Or at least, that's what the developers claim.

YPOPs! offers instructions for configuring a number of email clients to work with the program. Outlook 2007 wasn't listed, and when I tried configuring YPOPs! to work with Outlook 2007 I was unable to properly connect to the server. Have any of you tried the program and had more luck?

[via Online Tech Tips]

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.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but among all the personalized home page services, I think this is a first: Netvibes has added a module for their home pages that will show you new messages from your IMAP and POP3 e-mail accounts. The module allows you to customize the number of e-mail headings to show as well as specify a URL to link to a webmail account if you have one. This in addition to their preexisting Gmail and Yahoo! Mail support. Also new to me is Netvibes' Development Blog which is updated fairly constantly.