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I was recently introduced to IMAP by a friend. I was aware of IMAP for a very long time, but I never got around to actually using it. We turned to IMAP because had to answer support emails for a website collaboratively without using a ticket system.

Overview of IMAP

Although IMAP was supposed to be the natural successor of POP3, most email servers these days still use POP3. Regular internet users are not very familiar with IMAP, because, as with every new technology, there is a slight learning curve to it.

Webmail clients such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail have tried to mimic IMAP by using an interface that stores messages into folders the same way that IMAP does.

Ups and downs

Here’s a small list of the ups and downs and differences between IMAP and POP3:

Ups for IMAP:

• With IMAP all email messages are stored online on the email server.
• You can access any email message, even if it is 1 year old, from anywhere in the world. This is especially important if you travel frequently.
• You can share an email address with several collaborators and you can keep track of which emails were replied to, which emails are not yet read by anyone, and you can also set custom tags on messages that others can see (eg. Important/To Do/Personal/Later, etc).
• IMAP has folders—meaning that you can organize your email more efficiently than with POP3.
• You can create rules and actions to automatically move email messages to specific mail folders as soon as they get received.
• If your hard disk drive fails, you don’t risk losing your email archive, because it is stored online.
• You don’t need to worry about backing up your emails whenever you decide to upgrade your PC or reinstall the OS.

Downs for IMAP:

• The only disadvantage I can think of is that if you are ever disconnected from the Internet, you may not be able to read old emails without reconnecting. However, most email clients can work around this issue by downloading email messages for offline usage.

Copying offline messages to an IMAP server

I recently started to migrate all of my email accounts to IMAP, and I’m currently in the process of moving all of my saved (offline) email messages online.

If you want to copy your offline messages to an IMAP server, here’s how to do it:

1. First of all, I’m using Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client, if you don’t have it, please go get it. If you are using Outlook, it can import your email messages for you.
2. Set up your IMAP account, and recreate all of your email folders on the server.
3. Now you can just drag and drop your messages from the offline folder to a folder on the IMAP server. The Thunderbird status bar will display a message informing you that it is copying the messages one by one.
4. Your messages are now stored on the IMAP server!

That’s it, you can now access your emails from anywhere, even if you are at a friend’s computer, or at an Internet Cafe, or even in a wireless hotspot using a Pocket PC.

Technorati Tags: Email, IMAP, POP3, Mozilla Thunderbird