Technically savvy Google-Mail users have been waiting for it long time – IMAP support for their gmail accounts.
It´s alreeady there. And its not. If you reside in UK or on the ”Continent” aka ye olde Europe you may or may not have selected
“Language = English (UK)”. While it´s generally not a bad thing to stick to british english, especially for us school trained germans it´s not good to have it selected in your Gmail account – IF you want IMAP.
Google seems to ”roll out” new features depending on the language settings. I was wandering why some of my google accounts had IMAP already working, besides my main one. Changing the language settings to “Language = English (US)” did the trick – the IMAP-option appeared, activated by default.
Lifehacker has a great tutorial for Thunderbird / Imap / gmail perusage by the way.