GMail and IMAP

Finally the people at Google have gotten around to letting people access their GMail accounts via IMAP, and finally my account has been enabled too (it took a few days). I've wanted this almost since the very beginning (for some 2 years ago), and I gather from the reactions around the web that I'm not alone. Google on "gmail imap" and you get some 6 million hits, many (of course) referring to GMail now getting IMAP support, but a sizable amount of hits are from before this and talk about how to get IMAP support for GMail in other ways.