I was just fooling around on the Gmail website when I saw a link to check out their new features. Check them out I did, and boy was I surprised! Google is now giving complete access to their service through POP3. Not only that, they even support SMTP so that you can send your mail out directly from your client itself! Both SMTP as well as POP3 are protected by SSL. Note, you have to enable POP3 access from your Gmail settings for all this to work. Check out how to configure your client from this page.
Sometimes I really wonder on how Gmail does all this and that too for free. First they broke into the free web mail market by giving out 1 Gb of mail space and now this! I can hardly wait to see how the other free email service providers move to tackle this latest feature on Google’s email service. 
To the best of my knowledge this happened a long time back … I may be wrong thou
Ankur gupta