[SLUG] POP3 and IMAP

[David Webster]

Just following on from a conversation I was having with Mike Bennett 
last night.

I have the problem that I access my POP3 email account from three 
different boxes.  The problem is that I access my mailbox from three 
different machines.  I have two choices to managing my mail.

1) Set one machine to be the main one and tell it to delete mail from 
the server if I download it.  Then set the others to leave messages on 
the server.

2) Tell all machines to leave messages on the server.  this means that I 
don't know which messages are new.


Yesterday I was talking to Mike about bow Microsoft Exchange lets you 
leave messages on a server, but mark which ones are read.  Is there 
something similar for the rest of us?  Well yes!

I did some reading around and found that there is a third way.  IMAP
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Message_Access_Protocol]

It seems that IMAP is an alternative to POP3 which does that.  It lets 
me log in with different clients and remembers what I have read on the 
server.  Lots of email clients support it, including Thunderbird, which 
I use, and fortunately so does my email server.  The good thing with 
IMAP is that you can create folders on the server and use your clients 
to filter mail from your inbox into them, which is nice.  A quotation 
from Wikipedia:

"IMAP was designed by Mark Crispin in 1986 [1] as a modern alternative 
to the widely used POP e-mail retrieval protocol. Fundamentally, both of 
these protocols allow an e-mail client to access messages stored on an 
e-mail server."

1986!  IMAP is 20 Years old and I missed it :(

Dave