As of October 2007, Google have enabled IMAP support for Gmail, but it wasn’t showing in my settings. I did some searches and no-one had a workaround other than “wait, your server probably isn’t updated yet”. Well I think I have a fix, and it’s easy.

IMAP is a much better way of handling mail when you need to access it from multiple clients (like phone, computer, web etc) and keeping it synchronised.

I thought there had to be an easier way, so after some deductive reasoning I decided it may not be server based but language based. So I looked in my settings and found my language was set to English (UK) – note “Forwarding and POP” which should say “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” if I had IMAP support.

So I changed my language settings from English (UK) to English (US), hit the save button and that fixed it for me – IMAP was now available. I am gathering if you have it set to anything but English (US) it may not show.

I hope this helps others to get it working.

Update: Seems this only works if IMAP is enabled on your account, but you can’t see it due to the language setting not being on English (US). It’s worth giving it a try though because the language setting seems to hide it, but just a heads-up it may not work for everyone.

Regards,
Shane.