Recently Gmail activated IMAP for selected accounts, and I appeared to not be one of them. However was it really for selected accounts or was it for ‘selected languages’?! Reading about gmail on digg led me to an un-dug comment (I gave him a thumbs up!) saying that for IMAP to appear your language in gmail had to be set to ‘English (US)’. So I gave it a try, as I had mine on ‘English (UK)’ for the spelling.