Hi,

I was wondering what peoples opinions were in regards to setting email up as IMAP or POP3 and leaving a copy on the server?

I currently have my emails setup as POP3 (leave a copy on server) and I check them at home, work and on my phone.

Would I benefit if I changed these over to IAMP instead? (PLEASE NOTE: I have never used IMAP before but the server is already setup for it)

Thanks

IMAP gives you folders and organisation but the real question is, do you trust the host of the IMAP server implicitly? Switching to IMAP means you start using that server location as your primary (and generally speaking only) location of stored data. You can access it globally but then if they go down so do you.

I used POP3 for ages but after switching to IMAP (courtesy of Zimbra) a year or two ago, I don't think I could go back. If you only ever read your email from one device its not a big difference, but if you have say: a desktop, a laptop, and a phone which you read on IMAP is much better.

Things like having 'mark as read' on one device, showing up as mark on read for other devices is great and as mentioned you can sort your mail into folders once and have that visible everywhere.

If you have web-based access to (Gmail or Zimbra for example) then you've got another access mechanism too which is definitely handy.

I would also find it difficult to go back to POP as after having three or four different places i read my email it would be an endless amount of time spent on deleting and re reading. Although i still have a hotmail account that i use frequently just only use one platform to read it I wish they would active IMAP.

Hello,

From your experiences, does IMAP end up taking up alot of server space?

Kind regards,
Anthony

Anthony,

No, not really. IMAP is good for a business email solution, especially if you're always on the go.

We don't find it taking up too much space; however, we only have 14 mailboxes using IMAP.

I generally use IMAP when available.

However I have an automated regular back-up all of my folders to my local backup drive, which gives me a bit of piece of mind - if my host goes down, I'll still have all of my data .

- Andrew

If you decide to use POP3 and "Leave copy on server" be aware that Outlook doesn't always do this reliably; I've seen people lose email with this over the years. Newer Outlook versions may be much more reliable; I can't say from experience.

You can implement POP to multiple computers safely with the use of multiple emailboxes and a forwarder. For instance, to duplicate the email for brian@somewhere.com you'd create brian2@somewhere.com and forward a copy of email messages arriving at brian@somewhere.com to brian2@somewhere.com. Fiddly, but there are times when this works better than IMAP.

Ultimately with IMAP all your messages reside on the server. If you get a lot of email, there's a chance you could run into space issues; and you need to consider that.

Another option I've seen people use is to forward to Gmail. You can set Gmail to reply using the forwarded mailbox (eg as brian@somewhere.com). You can read email either via the web interface (with funky searching) or via Outlook. Don't do this if you're a Chinese dissident!

I was sceptical about iMap for some time. However, I've recently converted to it for those accounts (not all of them) that I access from more than one location. It works like a charm.

Of course I don't use MicroDolt Outlook.

As for comments such as:

Well yes, a server can go down and lose data. So can your local PC. But none of us would have any system or sub-sytem that wasn't routinely backed up, would we?

I lol'd

Way to gravedig by the way