On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 06:00:35PM +1300, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > On Fri, 15 Nov 2002 14:06, Huan Yee Chew wrote: > > While we're at the topic. Can anyone shed some light as to POP vs. IMAP? > > With pop you download the current contents of you mailbox to your PC thus > emptying it. With IMAP you, in effect, 'surf' your mail box(es). Your mail > stays on the server.
A reasonable mail client will connect to your IMAP mailboxes and cache everything on your PC, so you don't need to be connected the whole time. But you can connect again to the mailbox from a different PC/different software later on, and everything is still available. This gives you quite a lot of portability :-) For example, I often read my mail with a graphical reader (OSX.Terminal), but it can't do everything :-) so I often just use mutt, instead. -jim
