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The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) has come to Gmail. What this mean for smartphone and handheld users, especially iPhone owners, is a far smoother and easier to manage mob-e-mail experience.

That's because IMAP synchronizes your inbox across all the devices you use, be it desktop or palmtop, instantly and automatically. So if you read or write an e-mail on your iPhone, for example, the changes you make in Gmail are reflected when you got to access messages on your desktop.

This is quite different from POP-based e-mail, which Gmail has always supported. With POP, you can pull messages down to a mobile device from a mail server, but the changes your make to your inbox on your smartphone, for instance, aren't automatically reflected when you go to access your e-mail somewhere else.

So the next time you access your inbox from your desktop, all the messages will stream in as unread or new (even if you've opened them already on your smartphone), making it difficult to differentiate between e-mail you've already read or managed and those messages that are really new.

Gmail, IMAP, & The iPhone
With the iPhone, you can access your Gmail account through the smartphone's Mail application or through afari at m.gmail.com.

Although accessing Gmail through the mobile Web site gives you the same Gmail features you get through a browser on your desktop, most iPhone users will want to use the smartphone’s native Mail application.

To do this, the first thing you do is enable IMAP in your Gmail account from your PC or Mac. Click here for directions on how to do that.

Next, on the iPhone, you need to setup a new mail account. You do this by tapping Other in Settings --> Mail --> Add Account. Although Gmail is represented in the list (along with Yahoo! Mail, .Mac, and AOL), do not tap it. Currently, this will only let you setup a POP account. This is a problem Google says it is working on.

After tapping Other, you need to fill out your account settings, making sure IMAP is highlighted. The Host Name is imap.gmail.com and your user name is your full Gmail address. The Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) Host Name is smtp.gmail.com.

  

Click here for Google's detailed directions on how to setup IMAP-based Gmail on your iPhone.