On Sunday, December 22, 2002, at 04:35 PM, Dan Crutcher wrote: > I'm not really sure what IMAP does that POP3 doesn't -- maybe Lee > could explain that for us.
IMAP is a newer mail protocol that gives you a lot more flexibility about how you handle your mailboxes. If your mail server supports IMAP, you can choose to store your mailboxes on the server instead of on the machine that fetches your mail. This way, you can read your mail from any machine and see the same mail and mailboxes from everywhere. I find this very handy because I can read my mail in the office and at home without having to worry about what mail was stored where. My setup is a little more geeky than most. Some of my mail is stored on the Linux machine in my office, erdos.math -- the machine that serves this list -- and the rest is stored on my Mac at home. Both are set up to be IMAP servers, and both are always connected to the 'Net. My office machine contains all my "professional" mail and the home machine contains all my personal mail. The mail is automatically sorted into the correct boxes, home or office, as it comes in via a super filtering program called procmail. It could be done by any IMAP program with filtering, such as Mail.app, but procmail is nice because it will do it automatically in the background as the mail arrives. IMAP makes very little distinction about where the mailboxes live. I can drag mail between mailboxes on different machines as though they were all local. You can use IMAP mail just like POP mail and keep all your mailboxes local. In fact, I use POP to get all my mail off the InsightBB server, and once I get it, I can move it around between machines by dragging it just as though I got it with IMAP. IMAP is wonderful for mail in schools because students can read their mail at any workstation without leaving any mail files behind. The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be January 28 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
