Gmail BlackBerry Support Gets an Upgrade

August 25th, 2009 | by Christina WarrenComments

 Earlier this week, RIM pushed out an Enhanced Google Mail plug-in for BlackBerry users who use GmailGmail or Google Apps mail accounts.
This shouldn’t be confused with the separate Google Mobile suite for BlackBerry, as this add-on actually integrates some GoogleGoogle -centric enhancements to the regular BlackBerry mail interface.

Here are some of the highlights:
- The ability to star and label messages
- Mark messages as spam
- Perform a local or remote search of your entire inbox
- Threaded view
Until March of this year, Google mail integrated with the BlackBerry using the POP protocol. Since then, accounts have communicated with the BlackBerryBlackBerry Rocks! client using IMAP. IMAP is essential to this new plugin, so if you set-up your mail account with your BlackBerry before March, you’ll need to visit your phone carrier’s BlackBerry configuration page to delete and then re-add your account.
I got to play with the add-on a bit this morning, while adding my MashableMashable e-mail address to my BlackBerry Curve. The new label and local and remote search features are really nice – no longer do I need to open up the separate Gmail app just to search for an old message. I did run into some problems getting one of my accounts to work with my phone (the other two worked just fine), but after repeated delete/re-adds, it worked just fine.
The Enhanced Google Mail plug-in requires BlackBerry Device Software 4.5 or above. You can download the plugin by going to blackberry.com/gmail from your BlackBerry browser.