Because technology has come a long way over the past decade, people are now able to do lots of things that weren't previously possible. One of those things is to access their email accounts directly from their handheld portable device, namely mobile phones. And, if you are Gmail user and have tried to connect to your Gmail account via your mobile phone, you know how frustrating this is, mainly because any action you take doesn't synchronize with your Gmail account.

There is a considerable number of Gmail users who access their email account via a mobile phone or an email client using POP. Most of them probably don't like the fact that each time they read, sort or delete their messages using the POP email clients, the data isn't synced with the Google mail servers. This happens mainly because the POP protocol isn't capable of doing anything else but pull data from Google's servers. When using this one-way communication path, users will only be faced with unread messages when accessing their Gmail accounts via an Internet browser.

Nevertheless, there is a way in which users can change this and it consists of changing the way a device and client communicate with Gmail. If a user changes to a two-way communication path, like IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), it will allow the user's device and client to not only retrieve data from servers but also to communicate to the server any changes you have made in your account. Gmail users who want to switch to IMAP can easily do so by following these 5 steps, displayed on Google's Help Center page.

Google even provides its users with a list of IMAP supporting handheld devices and clients, thus offering its users better understanding of how they can improve their experience with Google email service.