The IMAP Advantage

The popular ways of accessing e-mail are either through a Web browser for a

Web-based service like Yahoo!, Hotmail, or Lycos; or through a mail client like

Outlook, Outlook Express (OE), or Eudora to access a mail server to send and

receive mail. Corporate accounts are often MS Exchange or Lotus Notes or other

groupware-solution based as well.

When you set up a mail account in a mail client, you are asked for the server

address of both your incoming and outgoing mail servers. Outgoing mail is always

sent using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Incoming mail can be of two

types: using the Post Office Protocol (POP) or the Internet Message Access

Protocol (IMAP). In most cases, you set up a POP 3 account.

In this article, we’ll discuss how in certain cases using IMAP 4 can make

your e-mail management much better. This discussion will be based on standard

e-mail servers and clients. Both POP3 and IMAP4 have been around for some time,

even though IMAP4 is newer than POP3 and is a significant improvement over it.

Separate mail accounts

If you’ve used an e-mail client such as OE or Netscape Messenger, you’ll

know that even if you set up multiple accounts to check mail from, all of them

land up in the same inbox. That is, if you check your Usa.net, Yahoo!, and any

other POP accounts in OE, the mail from all accounts gets mixed up in the inbox.

This can be resolved by setting up multiple IMAP accounts, which creates new

inboxes for each account separately. You can check mail in each account and yet

have them stored according to the account that received it.

Server-side mail storage

In POP mail, the mail gets downloaded onto your local inbox when you access

it. You can choose to let it remain on the server only for a limited amount of

time. In IMAP, however, the mail is always stored on the server and only a copy

of it gets downloaded onto your machine. You can also create folders on the mail

server from your e-mail client and organize your mail on the server into

folders. The advantage of this is that your e-mail is instantly available and

organized wherever you access your mail from, be it from your office, home, an

airport through a notebook, or from your Palm or mobile phone. Server-side

storage means instant availability anywhere.

Mail headers

One of the biggest problems I used to face when I was using POP mail (which I

ditched around three years back for IMAP) was the large amount of junk, spam,

and huge attachment mail that I got. In a bad connection to the Net, my entire

mail would get stuck due to unnecessary mail that would clog up the incoming

mail. If a mail with a large attachment was unable to get through, so would

other smaller but more important mail.

In IMAP, you have the option to download only the headers first. From the

headers you can get a lot of useful information, like who the mail is from, who

are the recipients, the subject, priority, date, and size of the mail, and

whether there are attachments. Based on the quickly downloadable headers you can

decide which mail you want to download and in which order. In OE, you can simply

press or mark the mail for later download.

Offline mail management

You can do most operations offline as well. That is, mark mail for download,

delete mail, move mail from one folder to the other, etc, even when you are not

connected to the mail server. When you do connect the next time, the mail server

will synchronize with the mail client and perform all the tasks in the same

order as you performed them. This makes mail management very cost effective.

Many times, I simply sync the headers of mail from my computer to my Palm (See

‘Internet Access with your Palm’ page 67), turn off my modem, and manage my

mail while watching TV. The next time I connect, all the tasks I did offline are

synced up in a few moments.

IMAP is a superset of the POP3 protocol. The only disadvantages to IMAP are,

one, that it assumes a pretty persistent Internet connection for you to do most

functions online on the server, and two, that the mail server must allow each

user to have a large amount of disk space for the advantages of IMAP to be used

to its fullest.

Most ISPs in India provide an e-mail account when you register with them.

Most of them also have IMAP support, but for some reason do not advertise it at

all. Try setting up an IMAP account on your mail client with the same settings

as that for your POP account. You may be surprised at the results. However, the

miserly amount of disk space that Indian ISPs give for e-mail doesn’t really

make the feature useful.

In free e-mail accounts, OperaMail. com, MailPlanet.net, and MailandNews. com

provide IMAP support with infinite, 40 MB and 10 MB of disk space for mail

respectively.

So get on to the IMAP bandwagon and enjoy the benefits of anytime, anywhere

e-mail access from a fast mail client (unlike the horrendously slow Web mail).

Vinod Unny is a technology

consultant with iSquare Technologies