Rumor has it that Gmail will soon be going from strictly POP access to IMAP. That means that all of you who are using external mail clients will soon be able to mark messages as read, delete them and sync your Outlook and Thunderbird to your Gmail account.

Like many of Google’s upgrades, the changes are appearing sporadically across users accounts. More than likely in an attempt to work out the kinks in the feature with a small set of randomly chosen testers before going mainstream.

For everyone who has been lucky enough to make the cut, tell us about it. Do you think IMAP support is the last push that Gmail needs to take over the web mail arena?

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