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Get Free POP/IMAP from GMail

Published on May 30, 2008 in Info Tech. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

[Nairobi, Kenya]
I REMEMBER when I used to be a Yahoo! Canada email whore. I had the choice of downloading my mail via POP in any of my favourite email clients like Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus or Outlook Express.

Anyone with a yahoo.com email address didn’t get this privilege though. Instead, you had to pay something like $19.95 per year, which also increased your email storage to 1Gb. And Hotmail teased you a bit by allowing you to download your email into Outlook, but no luck if you were using a competitor’s email client. Thank you Microsoft! Back then, it would’ve taken a miracle for netizens to get free POP and IMAP service. In fact, Hell would have to freeze over first.

Hell freezes over…
Well, I was shocked when Google first announced it’s revolutionary GMail service. The fact that they gave you 2Gb of space totally screwed Yahoo and Microsoft. But they also included a lots of FREE goodies that everybody else was charging for. Overnight, paying for POP and IMAP services became a thing of the past. I haven’t looked back since.
In short, I’m a GMail addict. Yes, I still have my Yahoo Canada email addy, but I’m in love – with GMail. It’s like meeting the woman of my dreams who’s smart, sexy, witty, creative, dignified, a great cook, charming, yet “naughty” under the sheets. Once you find a woman like that, you can never let her go. Ditto for GMail in the realm of email hosting. Yep, I’m hooked for life.

POP vs IMAP…
To quickly find out the differences between POP and IMAP, just peek this blog post on the GMail blog. For those of you blessed with a constant, reliable broadband connection, IMAP is the way to go. In all honesty, now that Google gives me a whopping 6771 Mb (6.8Gb) of storage space, I haven’t used POP/IMAP services in a looong time. What’s shocking is that I’m a power user and I’ve only used 10% of my space so far.

Besides, I’m here in East Africa so I just check GMail on my Nokia 6070 via Safaricom or Celtel’s EDGE/3G/HSDPA mobile network. I surfed to gmail.com/mobile and downloaded a tiny, slick app right onto my Nokia that feels like a tiny desktop email client. Heck, it’s fast as hell!! Those Google programmers sure know how to write “gooood” software that goes down nice. :-)

You are currently using 728 MB (10%) of your 6771 MB


Well, at least I know of a top notch POP and IMAP service that’s free when I’m ready to use it once again. For now, I’m quite happy using GMail either in the Mozilla Firefox browser or on my Nokia.

Now, imagine being on a safari or hanging out somewhere remote in Kenya and you’re still able to read your email since most of the country is covered by EDGE…and the cost is only something like 10 or 12 Kenya Shillings per megabyte. That’s a paltry US 20 cents for sending and receiving a ton of emails or web browsing. Simply amazing!

Thank you Safaricom, Celtel and Google.

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