How to Enable the IMAP Access to your GMail Account?

Steps to Enable the IMAP Access to your GMail Account:

Configuration of Gmail Server to setup the Gmail account in Mail Clients

Configuration is a process of setup your email account in a mail client. There are various mail clients are available right now in the market. Gmail , ThunderBird,Outlook and Aol are some examples of the popular mail clients.Along with this we also have some less secured third party apps which are works as Mail Clients.While configuring the mail server in any of mail client , we must know the Configuration details (i.e SMTP & IMAP ) of that mail server.

And these configuration details are vary from mail server to mail server. i.e the configuration details like SMTP and IMAP Details will be varied to individual mail servers. For example find the configuration details for the gmail as mentioned below

Gmail Configuration Details:

SMTP Host: smtp.gmail.com

SMTP Port: 587

IMAP Host:imap.gmail.com

Imap Port: 993

If you have above configuration details of your email server , you can easily configure your email account in your selected mail client.But in the case of gmail , while you configuring along with having smtp and imap , you must follow below mentioned steps in order to setup your email account in your selected mail client.

In Case of Gmail as your Mail Server , then you need to follow below 3 steps ,
to Enable the Access to your Mail Client

STEP 1: (Sign in to your Gmail Account)

In this step you just sign in to your gmail account.which you want to configure.

Open any browser and go to Gmail login page & Login to your Gmail Account by providing valid email and password.

*Note: If you already login into your account just ignore this step.

STEP 2: (Turn ON Less Secure Apps)

After successful login to your gmail account,open another tab in the same browser & Click on following link / copy below url and paste it in the new tab url field and press enter,
https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps

Then it will display the following screen

Bydefault the selection will be in “Turn Off” state, means it will not allow the less secured apps to configure the mail server. Now you need to Allow the less secured Apps By Selecting “Turn ON” Option.For this you need to select the Turn on radio button as shown in the below figure.

Then it will be updated as shown in the following screen,

After selecting the Turn On option, just close the window.By doing this you are giving access to for the less secure apps to configure your mail.

STEP 3: (Enable your account Access)

In this step we are going to enable our account access with the following process.

For this just click on on FollowingLink

After successful completion of step2 , just close that tab and open another new tab in the same browser & Click on following link / copy below url and paste it in the new tab url field and press enter,

 https://accounts.google.com/b/0/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

Then it will display the following screen,

In the above screen to allow access to your Google account you need to click on Continue button.

--> So just Click on Continue Button as shown in above screen,

Then it will display the following screen,

It shows that , Your Gmail Account access is enabled , just close this window
Now Account is Successfully Enable for IMAP Access to your Mail Client.

Note:

If you try to configure your gmail account in any one mail client as mentioned above with out performing above mentioned process will results the errors like account access is not enabled or unable to configure.

This will be result in the case third party Less Secured Apps & Mail Clients only. Where as in case of Gmail as your Mail client , then no need to perform above steps.