email: POP v. IMAP – Four reasons to switch to IMAP
Reduce e-mail aggravations by changing your the way you receive your messages
by Joe Kissell , Macworld.com
You may know that your e-mail client uses either the Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) standard to retrieve your messages. But do you know why you should care?
When you retrieve a message using IMAP, your e-mail client makes a local copy, but a copy also remains on the server (until you delete it). Better yet, IMAP saves a lot of information about your message—for example, whether you’ve read, filed, or forwarded it. The result is your inbox looks the same whether you’re looking at it on your iPhone or your Mac. By contrast, when you use POP to retrieve a message, your local copy becomes your only copy. The message is typically deleted from the server. Even if you tell your e-mail client to leave a message on the server after downloading it, the server won’t know whether you’ve read or replied to it.
POP uses bandwidth more efficiently, which is good for people with very slow Internet connections, and it doesn’t impose inbox storage quotas. But IMAP offers a host of other advantages. Here are four big reasons I think you should switch today. (After you’re convinced, learn how to make the switch by reading The IMAP advantage.)
1. Avoid webmail outages
Not long ago, Gmail suffered an outage that affected only users who accessed their e-mail via the Web. Users who connected to their Gmail accounts using IMAP were unaffected, and could continue to retrieve their mail as usual. To be sure, such problems are extremely infrequent, but even so, the moral is that having more than one way to access any given e-mail account can be extremely useful. The vast majority of e-mail providers that offer IMAP access also let you access your mail on the Web, and many (though not all) Webmail providers also let you use IMAP.
