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.
Actually, you can choose between flushing your mailbox, or keeping the retrieved messages on the server with POP, too. The big difference is that with POP you have to retrieve a complete message to obtain any header info like sender or subject, while with IMAP you can take a look at the header info without wasting bandwidth for downloading the message body. Thus IMAP enables you to interactively discard unwanted mail on the server, which is not possible with POP. Just imagine someone sending you some 2 MB junk you don't want, and you have a slow modem... Happened to me when one of my friends who knows nothing about data or computers sent me some MBs of pics from the company, and I still had a 14.400 baud modem. A solution to this problem when using POP is to program a filter on the server that discards any mail bigger than welcome, and sends a respective message to the originator asking them to pack their content to a smaller volume. Cheers, Helmut. +----------------+ | Helmut Walle | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +----------------+
