Google is rolling out IMAP support to its gmail and google hosted users. You can activate it by going to settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP and select Enable IMAP.

If you don’t see the IMAP option yet, you can try to logout and then log back in to see if it appears.

For those of you who don’t know, IMAP is a protocol for fetching email from a remote server, like POP, but more advanced. The main difference is that IMAP is designed to be used from multiple computers, so email is not deleted from the mail server when it is downloaded.