After all the hoopla surrounding the launch of its OpenSocial API (see my recent post), Google has also significantly upgraded their Gmail offering, demonstrating once again how they are working hard to extend and retain their online community.

The Gmail upgrade includes the following significant new features:

• IMAP access to gmail
• a storage upgrade, almost doubling the capacity to 4.5 GB

Google has addressed the shortcomings of its POP3 implementation for its Gmail service in a very elegant way. You can now synchronize your folders with Gmail using IMAP, which a very comfortable paradigm to process email. Multiple clients can synchronize different "folders", including Gmail's labels, which act as a kind of virtual folder system. I am not aware of any large free email provider offering IMAP - it usually comes as an additional paid service.

The storage upgrade of course speaks for itself and in this age of multimedia is likely to be attractive to most people. Plus one can really use Gmail as an archive / backup and not have to worry about backups otherwise.

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