As everyone and their mothers already know, Google recently started activating IMAP support on Gmail, and it looks like most people seem pretty excited about the announcement.

Now, personally, I seem to get by fairly well just using good old POP3 access, and a few filters on the server and my own custom list of folders on my Outlook PST files where I organize mail I want to keep. It's not exactly elegant, but it's what I'm used to and sort of works, though I'll be the first to admit it is kind of awkward to have some email here and some email there and in different locations.

I've never really used IMAP, but I'm willing to give it a try, who knows, maybe I've been missing out on all the fun! So what do I do? I go into outlook, delete my old Gmail account, and create a new one set up with IMAP.

What is the next thing I notice? For some reason, Outlook 2007 seems to believe that if you choose to use IMAP, you're not worthy of choosing the location of your PST file on disk: the file must be on your Windows profile directory in one of those useless, awfully hidden, un-backupable directories (i.e. C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\...). Isn't this an extremely silly restriction to have on a mature, v12 product?

Outlook