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This is relatively old news on the internet, but Google is now offering IMAP connections to Gmail accounts. IMAP allows you to view your e-mail on the server from various IMAP-enabled mail clients, keeping it synchronized among the different clients. POP3 had been the only other way to view your Gmail account outside of the Gmail site, and that would require downloading your e-mail to a POP3 client or webmail service (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.). However, if you were to check your Gmail from multiple POP3 clients, the clients would not necessarily remain synchronized.

Lifehacker has a quick tutorial on how to setup Thunderbird to take advantage of the Gmail IMAP goodness. You will want to follow their directions to quickly make use of your Gmail tags as Thunderbird folders. Then dump the automatically created Thunderbird folders for Junk, Trash and Sent, in favor of the Gmail folders for Spam, Trash and Sent Mail, respectively. The LH article even shows you how to get Gmail keyboard control in Thunderbird using the GMailUI Thunderbird extension.

I have already started moving my e-mail archive, with messages that date back to 1999, over to Gmail from Thunderbird. Gmail’s lack of IMAP was the only thing that held me back from doing this when I dropped Outlook for Thunderbird earlier this year. Now I can have my archive wherever I check mail. I’ll have to look into Google Apps for Domains for ask-mark.com to complete my Google circle.