For those avid Gmail users, if you haven’t noticed the significant recent upgrades to Gmail, then you’re truly missing out. To name a few, Gmail now supports IMAP, got new Emoticon styles, added Group Chat support, created Colored Label tabs, made a new Contacts Manager, and most recently added support for internal AIM Chat.

With IMAP, external email clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird, or applications found on portable devices like the iPhone or a cell phone can communicate with your mail much more effectively. Rather than simply storing email from POP connections as Gmail did in the past, IMAP syncs allow much more functionality. For instance, if you read a mail in your client engine with IMAP, your Google account will be smart enough to know this and mark the mail as read, rather than keeping hundreds of exported, unread mail. Of course, there are many more advantages of IMAP that one can find out by reading this Wiki article: Internet Message Access Protocol [Wikipedia]

To simply put it, the new emoticons, colored labels, and group chat services are simply cool. They offer many internally gathered tools that most web-based email clients simply don’t offer. Colored labels helps you organize and recognize emails with much more ease. Plus, they’re very shiny spiffy. This asethetic appeal also bonds with the 3 sub-styles of emoticons featuring ASCII Styles, Squared Styles, and Rounded Styles. In addition to this, Gmail’s chat expanded even more with group chat and AIM chat support. Google users can now chat with their AIM buddies through Gmail’s internal embedded chat engine.

With all these great new features, Gmail just turned your ordinary web browser into a portable, web 2.0 social machine.

For further official information from Gmail, visit: What’s new on Gmail? [About Gmail]