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Gmail changed all that. Google’s free Web-based e-mail service offers a so-good-you-forget-it’s-there spam filter, multi-gigabytes of storage, custom addresses, and more, all for free.

On the Gmail Labs settings page (click on Settings, then select the Labs tab), you’ll find a list of more than 40 experimental Gmail features which you can selectively enable or disable. Google warns that these features may “change, break, or disappear” at any time, but I think a few of them are well worth the risk:

Canned Responses If you find yourself typing the same message over and over, you can instead type it once, save it

Well, that's what I intended to do, anyway. The more I wrote, the more I realized how many aspects of the IMAP/Gmail/Mail universe are unclear or confusing, as evidenced by the many email messages I've received on those subjects, and as feedback to my books ("Take Control of Apple Mail in Leopard" and "Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail") and my Macworld articles on the topic. So, what I thought would be a straightforward article has turned into a manifesto. (That means it's quite long, and somewhat opinionated - fair warning!) And, I admit it: I've written it for a largely selfish reason,
which is to save myself from having to explain this information repeatedly in email messages! But I do hope you'll find it interesting and helpful if you've ever struggled with the combination of IMAP, Gmail, and Mail.

POP and IMAP are both methods of retrieving messages from a mail server. (In fact, many mail servers support both protocols, enabling you to access the same messages in either way.) The most common way to explain the difference between POP and IMAP is this: With POP, you download all your messages to your computer, whereas with IMAP, all your messages remain on the server. That's more or less true, but it overlooks several important points.

In the first place, IMAP servers, unlike POP servers, can keep track of flags for each message, indicating things like which messages have been read, forwarded, or replied to. With POP, your local email client has to track this information. That means if you download a bunch of messages on computer A using POP but leave them on the server, and then switch to computer B, you can still download the messages again, but they'll all appear to be unread - computer B won't know which messages you've seen, filed, or otherwise dealt with, because
that information isn't kept on the POP server.

To enable IMAP, log in to your Gmail account, click on the Settings link at the top, click on the Forwarding And POP/IMAP link, select Enable IMAP, and click on Save Changes. You can then click on the Configuration Instructions link to learn how to set up your favorite e-mail client to access Gmail via IMAP. (To learn more about the ins and outs of using Gmail via IMAP with Mail, see “Achieving E-mail Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail”.)

Previews in Mail If you check your Gmail messages in Mail, you might tire of clicking on links to get to the videos and photos friends and colleagues send you. Several Labs features let you preview media stored on other sites within an incoming Mail message when the sender includes only a link. Examples include YouTube Previews in Mail, Picasa Previews in Mail, and Flickr Previews in Mail.

Filter your messages more effectively

Gmail offers a basic but highly useful filtering system, which examines incoming messages and then takes some action based on each message’s characteristics. For example, filters can apply a label to all messages with a certain word in the subject, or from a certain sender; they can also archive messages (keeping them out of your Inbox), mark them as read, and take other actions. Although these filters aren’t as powerful as the rules features of programs such as Mail and Microsoft Entourage, they have the advantage of being able to presort your mail even when you’re checking your messages in a Web browser or on an iPhone or other mobile device that doesn’t have its own filtering capability.