After increasing the capacity of storage in its free GMail service, Google surprises all its GMail users  by introducing IMAP support this week. IMAP is an acronym for Internet Message Access Protocol, by which GMail users can sync GMail with their email clients. Synching, EMail clients - if these terms looks too much techinical for you, here is the simplified version. GMail and most free web mail service providers offers POP3 access by which you can access your mail in your mobile phones, Blackberry, iPhones and email clients like Thunderbird etc installed in your machine. In all these applications, you can read, reply, mark, move and delete your email messages depends upon the options available. But when you logged into the web client of the service provider, all your messages will remain unread and you have to repeat the same procedure to sync up both or all the environment. If you are accessing your email by multiple applications, then syncing up the messages in all the application is a tiresome and boring task.

IMAP is the only solution for this by which status of all messages will be in sync in all the applications which access the account. Google started offering this service to all users in phases and for absolute free of charge. To enable this service, you have to go to your GMail account and click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab in settings and turn it on. In case you are seeing only Forwarding and POP tab only in the settings, then wait for your turn and as per Google, this feature will be rolled to all users in a week time.

All saying this, i’m really wondering about the benefits Google will obtain by offering this service for free. Google actually monetizes in GMail only thro’ the contextual ads displayed in the sidebar of the mail client. Now the user is allowed to download the mail and can perform everything in his client itself without accessing web client of GMail, then there will be an impact in the ad revenue generation. Probably then can start embeding contextual ads in the footer/any other visible area of the mail soon.