Another big change from Google. For the first time in the free webmail world, Gmail starts offering IMAP support. It should be available to all the users in a few days. The guys over Downloadsquad got a pic of this.

Google has put together detailed instructions on how to make IMAP for Gmail work with a number of clients, including Apple’s iPhone. The advantage of IMAP is that it keeps e-mail data synced across multiple devices, so any changes made remotely instantly appear on the Web and elsewhere.

With IMAP, users can now access their email via a desktop application like Outlook or Thunderbird, read emails, make changes, delete, and have the changes made across platforms. So if you now log into your Gmail account, the message which you read in Thunderbird, will now be marked accordingly. No more wasting time trying to sift through emails that had already been answered.

Update: Netscape/AOL webmail already supporting IMAP and so the ‘First time’ label was incorrect.  Thanks to Shariqul for pointing this out.