This is good news all around. Google's Gmail service is finally supporting IMAP. Since it started, Google has always supported POP3, but now with IMAP google is better than ever. IMAP is what you want to use if you have multiple devices you read your email from. For example, say you get mail at work through Outlook, from home on your Mac with Thunderbird and on your Blackjack smartphone. With POP3, each client downloads mail to your PC and like your mailman dropping off the mail each day, what you do with the mail then is your business. With IMAP, mail is stored on the server...you synchronize your email client to the server and read emails as they come in. It's great because it uses less bandwidth than POP3 (because you don't have to download the messages in their entirety--you can download just the headers and then download the entire email if it suits you.) and it synchronizes across all devices that access that account.
The only downside is that with IMAP is that message stay on the server until you delete them, which means periodically you must go in and clean up your mailboxes. This is usually no big deal...I usually do it on the 15 and 30th of each month and at any one time I have 2 weeks of mail on the servers...a manageable amount.
What it means for me is that I can manage email for X-Oriente on my iPhone (or whatever your smartphone du jour is) and changes I make on the phone will be reflected on my desktop. Here is a pretty good explanation of how POP and IMAP differ.
Do any of you guys use gmail or yahoo mail for managing Masonic or lodge email?