Email

[andrewducker]

In ye _really_ olden days people used to read email on a box connected to a large server somewhere, using a textbased piece of software like elm (for electronic mail) or pine (because geeks like puns).

A bit later, people needed to be able to download email from a server onto their own machines so they could read them there, and free up some more space in their online mailbox. To do this they used the Post Office Protocol (or POP) to connect, download all new emails and then disconnect again. The problem with this was that once you'd downloaded them onto your computer they couldn't easily be on any other computer. Which meant that you ended up either forwarding them to your other accounts (or yourself) to read later, or just doing without.

And then came IMAP. the Internet Message Access Protocol. This allowed you to leave the messages on the server, which would keep them _forever_ - and your email client would connect to it and just tell you what messages were sitting there. If you marked a message as read (or replied to) then that marking would happen _on the server_ and you would see exactly the same view no matter what computer you were on.

However, some geeks had been using the internet for a very long time, or had been told once that POP was how you downloaded email, and they never tried out IMAP, despite it being much more useful. Especially now that you can have gigabytes of email sitting online without worrying about space restraints.

But nowadays even GMail supports it. And it's dead handy. So give it a go.

(This post prompted by johanna_alice, who wass having problems reading email on two machines, and was doing all sorts of complex things to work around it, when IMAP would have solved the problems instantly.)

Comments

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

I still don't understand what it does that gmail itself sitting on the web doesn't do. Well, apart from the push thing where I can be irritated regularly by my phone (or whatever) telling me there's spam or a new mailing list reply etc and I never quite worked out why I'd want that.

[andrewducker]

Oh, if you like the gmail interface then that's fine.

Personally I find it terribly distracting a lot of the time. I prefer the thunderbird interface.

Other people prefer the Outlook interface.

Or a variety of other programs.

It means that we can read our email in any program we like, rather than being stuck with the one we're given.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

But can't you do that with pop3? What's the difference? Just the "saved state" thing?

[andrewducker]

If I download the email onto machine 1 then it's not on machine 2.

And POP doesn't support the notion of folders at all.

You can't do this with POP:

[nmg.livejournal.com]

POP3 lets you do the following:

• Check how many mails are in your maildrop
• List the size of the mails in your maildrop
• Retrieve a mail from your maildrop
• Delete a mail from your maildrop

That's it - the sum total. You can set your mail client to never delete anything from your maildrop, but there's no way to organise your mail on the server side.

IMAP allows you to do the following:

• Create, rename and delete mailboxes (folders)
• Select a mailbox for further operations
• Fetch a message from a selected mailbox
• Set flags on a message in a selected mailbox
• Store and copy messages in a selected mailbox
• Perform certain operations on all messages with a given flag in a selected mailbox (expunge deleted, for example)

POP3 gives you a PO box. IMAP gives you a filing cabinet.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

Gmail also has(had?) some sort of hack that's possible if you leave the page open and navigate to an infected page that inserts a new filter for you.

[andrewducker]

Fixed, I believe, the next day...

[derumi.livejournal.com]

Awesome. It's always easier to hear the bad news over the good.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Hey, some of us still use pine.

[andrewducker]

Geek!

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

That's so 2007. I've moved on to alpine :)

[andrewducker]

Wow. That's scary - it looks so familliar from when I used pine back in 1991!

[martling.livejournal.com]

Dude, get with the program. Mutt!

[johanna-alice.livejournal.com]

:) Thanks for the leg up to the 21st century. Later there will be experimental geekery now that I've confirmed Panther will play ball with IMAP (Or rather the Apple Mail packaged therein as I've never got as far as Thunderbird), but first food.

old skool

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

I use mutt.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

FYI: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001072.html

[andrewducker]

Jesus. That's _awful_.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

So, as a luddite who uses his .Mac account as POP email and manually sorts email into folders, how do I go about recreating that folder structure via IMAP? And will I still have Mac Mail's very powerful search facility for old emails (something I use on a near-daily basis)?

[andrewducker]

Not a Mac user - but in Thunderbird I added a new account that pointed to the server using IMAP, and then simply dragged all the folders across to it. Took about 15 minutes to copy them all up.

Don't know about searching. But I do know that it's Mac's preferred method:
http://www.apple.com/dotmac/mail.html

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

I was always told that pine stands for "pine is not elm". Recursion and puns = geek heaven...

[thorn11.livejournal.com]

I used to have a t-shirt that said that phrase. One day when I was at the mall some yuppy soccer-mom asked me what I meant by it.

[thorn11.livejournal.com]

when i say 'that phrase' i mean :"normal people worry me"

[jccw.livejournal.com]

In the really olden days people used the "mail" Unix command... Some people still do (not me though).

By the way, do you happen to know if IMAP handles duplicate messages efficiently (that is, does it store n copies of each message sent to a mailing list with n recipients on the server, or just one shared copy)? The reason I ask is that (a) the university mail servers are chronically short of space and (b) we get a LOT of talk announcements and other spam-like things, and I suspect that (a) is partly due to (b).

[andrewducker]

IMAP is purely a client protocol, it specifies nothing about how data is stored on the server...

[thorn11.livejournal.com]

huh. I guess i use IMAP, but one of the most fantastic things about gmail is that I can set it up to do fairly complicated things without really knowing what I'm doing because it gives me tons of specific instructions.
I set up gmail to archive the emails that I download onto my computer. So they're all still there and searchable, but they aren't filling up my inbox.

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I do nowt but read e-mails, and delete them once they're done with from my inbox. I do miss Pegasus mail however - is what you speak about a method that allows any web mail to be accessed by a prog on my local drive then, or is it just a central web-based application? And don't Yahoo or MSN support it?

[andrewducker]

It works with any mail system that supports it. Which is pretty much all non-web ones, plus GMail. Yahoo supports POP, I believe. MSN's a bit crap.

[oldbaldchris.livejournal.com]

POP works fine for me , I download to whichever computer I`m at , read the e-mail , delete the e-mail , end. On the extremely rare occasions I want to keep the message I use a piece of equipment called a printer together with a piece of paper. That way it can be filed with the REAL post (you do remember that do you Andy?) :)

[andrewducker]

I use emails for organisation. See the picture elsewhere in this post, with various subfolders - that's my reminders that is.

And because I can get to my email from my phone, I have all of my flight information (for instance) available for me wherever I am.

Bits of paper get lost. And the last bit of post that was actually worth keeping was my mortgage documents - 9 months ago.