Philoking.comfrom Jason Burns’ perspective…

I know it’s hard, we all do. We gather around in our little group, and everyone takes turn standing up and saying, “Hi, my name is Jason, and I am a POP3 Email user.”

The crowd welcomes you and begins to help you heal. Everyone knows you should be using IMAP, you’ve been tucking email everywhere, hoping your family won’t notice that you have 14 inboxes.

The telltale signs are all there, you stay up all hours of the night making sure your mobile devices, work PC, laptop and home computer all have the mail synced the same. You have deleted that Viagra spam mail that made it through your filter four times but still you hang on….

I kid, but seriously. I used to do this. I would use webmail at work, POP3 on two laptops, two desktops and a Windows Mobile phone. I synced my ass off and it was still always out of whack.

Unlike many of the splintered, I refuse to have fourteen email accounts. I have one that I manage well and guard against spam with an iron fist. I do have a few for specific sites, but they all forward directly into the main one. I get a lot of mail. How do I do it? IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)

If your client is any of the following, you can too!

• Apple Mail
• Novelle GroupWise Windows Client
• iPhone
• Eudora
• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Outlook Express
• Microsoft Entourage
• Windows Mail
• Windows Mobile Mail
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Pegasus Mail
• Opera Mail

The Advantages over POP3

Connected and disconnected modes of operation
When using POP3, clients typically connect to the e-mail server briefly, only as long as it takes to download new messages. When using IMAP4, clients often stay connected as long as the user interface is active and download message content on demand. For users with many or large messages, this IMAP4 usage pattern can result in faster response times.

Multiple clients simultaneously connected to the same mailbox
The POP3 protocol requires the currently connected client to be the only client connected to the mailbox. In contrast, the IMAP protocol specifically allows simultaneous access by multiple clients and provides mechanisms for clients to detect changes made to the mailbox by other, concurrently connected, clients.

Access to MIME message parts and partial fetch
Nearly all internet e-mail is transmitted in MIME format, allowing messages to have a tree structure where the leaf nodes are any of a variety of single part content types and the non-leaf nodes are any of a variety of multipart types. The IMAP4 protocol allows clients to separately retrieve any of the individual MIME parts and also to retrieve portions of either individual parts or the entire message. These mechanisms allow clients to retrieve the text portion of a message without retrieving attached files or to stream content as it is being fetched.

Message state information
Through the use of flags defined in the IMAP4 protocol, clients can keep track of message state; for example, whether or not the message has been read, replied to, or deleted. These flags are stored on the server, so different clients accessing the same mailbox at different times can detect state changes made by other clients. POP3 provides no mechanism for clients to store such state information on the server so if a single user accesses a mailbox with two different POP3 clients, state information–such as whether a message has been accessed–cannot be synchronized between the clients. The IMAP4 protocol supports both pre-defined system flags and client defined keywords. System flags indicate state information such as whether a message has been read. Keywords, which are not supported by all IMAP servers, allow messages to be given one or more tags whose meaning is up to the client. Adding user created tags to messages is an operation supported by some web-based email services, such as Gmail.

Multiple mailboxes on the server
IMAP4 clients can create, rename, and/or delete mailboxes (usually presented to the user as folders) on the server, and move messages between mailboxes. Multiple mailbox support also allows servers to provide access to shared and public folders.

Server-side searches
IMAP4 provides a mechanism for a client to ask the server to search for messages meeting a variety of criteria. This mechanism avoids requiring clients to download every message in the mailbox in order to perform these searches.

What does all this mean to you?

It means that you can have your mail on every device you use, and when you make changes to the state of your mailbox (delete, send mail, organize, etc) It will be reflected anytime you access it from any other device. Central management FTW!

If you haven’t already, go to your Gmail Settings, enable IMAP support, find your client on their setup help page, and give it a test drive. You can always switch back, but why would you?