[Wolves] Is IMAP better than POP?

[Mark Harrison]

Dave Morley wrote:
> Is IMAP better than POP and if so why please?
>   
>   

Yes.

IMAP is a functional superset of POP - ie it does everything that POP 
can, but can do lots of other stuff as well... a few such things are ....

1: You can use it in an "online mode" as well as for grabbing stuff down 
POP-style

2: You can use IMAP just to read the headers, and then work out which 
messages you want to download (which, in my view, means that it's better 
than POP on slow links... on the basis that this feature outweighs the 
minor differences in network overhead.)

3: It's more secure - POP sends passwords in the clear, IMAP uses 
challenge response based on encrypted passwords [APOP - Authenticated 
POP exists, but supports even fewer clients/servers than IMAP]


Please ignore comparison documents written in the early 90s which talk 
about previous versions of IMAP with no "offline mode"... IMAP has been 
able to "grab mail down for offline reading" for over 10 years :-)


About the only reason for using POP only is if you're an ISP who wants 
to make damned sure those pesky customers get their mail off of your 
diskspace quickly :-)


M.