Orange told me that Gmail IMAP on the Blackberry Pearl they sold me is “not supported”, and couldn’t tell me how to set it up. In fact, it can be configured to work.
What you need to do is set up a new email account with an email such as anything_at_all @ site about nothing .com. The “site about nothing” part needs to be a domain that has a mail record set up, but don’t use gmail, hotmail or yahoo for this because the blackberry will set the mail server automatically without giving you the chance to choose IMAP.
It will tell you it cannot configure the email account for you, and offer the option of configuring it yourself. You will have to follow through 3 or 4 pages saying the same thing, but you will reach a form that lets you enter all the fields you need to. Go on to enter the true details of your Gmail account, using mail server: imap.googlemail.com, port: 993.
It might be a little slow for your email actions to be synchronised between your blackberry device and your Gmail account, but it really does work! Now when I mark an email as read on my blackberry, it is also marked as read in my main Gmail account.
