E-Mail with IMAP

Will IMAP Change the Way You E-Mail?

By: Eric Durrand

In February 2004, Yahoo! Mail had 39.9 million users, MSN Hotmail 34.4 million and America Online 31.7 million, according to industry tracker Nielsen/NetRatings. Since the early days of the Internet, E-mail had been its most popular application. Today, it seems that everyone has their own E-mail account. Despite all that, very few people bother to understand the underlying technologies that make E-mail what it is.

Often, we only notice a technology when it doesn’t function as well as it should; when it no longer delivers what we need; when it needs to be replaced. Such is the case with POP3, the Post Office Protocol that most of us still use to fetch our messages from our provider’s web-server to our own inbox. POP3, it seems, can no longer satisfy the modern user: the tide of spam hits every inbox, and as wireless networks multiply, more and more people expect to access their inbox from everywhere. POP3, a rather limited protocol, does not rise to the challenge of smart management and multiple devices.

Figure 1: E-Mail Protocols

The IMAP protocol is an alternative to POP3 in handling incoming mail (both rely on SMTP – Simple Mail Transport Protocol, to delivery outgoing messages). It was first conceived in 1986 at Stanford University, and went through many updates and revisions to its current version: IMAP4rev1. A minority of users, usually advanced users and businesses, have been using IMAP for many years, but until recently, POP3’s place as the leading protocol seemed secure.

With the introduction of Gmail, Google’s revolutionary E-mail service, on April 1st 2004, E-mail seems to have changed forever. Gmail offered users 1GB of storage for their messages, and today offers more than twice that. Users have begun to view E-mail services differently: not just as a message delivery service, but also as a message storage, organization, and sorting service. Other E-mail services followed suit: Yahoo Mail went from offering 4MB to offering 1GB of storage. MSN Hotmail service went from 2.5MB to 250MB, AOL now offers 2GB. ISPs too are slowly beginning to realize that users want more out of their E-Mail. Not being able to offer advanced features over the old POP3, many of them turn to IMAP.

IMAP’s first advantage over POP3 is that it allows server-side mail storage and sorting. What it means is that all mail can be saved on the server, sorted into folders, and downloaded to your client while still keeping a copy on the server for later retrieval. As a rule mail servers are better maintained and secured than personal computers, and therefore the chance of losing information stored on such a server is considerably smaller than if it was stored only on a single desktop computer (See Figure 2).

Figure 2: Security Benefits

Another major benefit is IMAP’s ability to synchronize and work with multiple clients. Many users can share a single E-mail address (say, a general business address), and a single user can access his inbox and stored folders from multiple devices: A workstation at the office, a home computer, a laptop or a PDA/Smart phone, so that every device can enjoy access to every message, not as a duplicate but as a single message, any changes to which will reflect in other devices. For instance – if you identify a message as Spam and put it in the Junk Mail folder, you will not see it again in your Inbox when you access it from a new device, something that happens with POP3 when messages are not removed completely from the server. Or if you move a newsletter message to the Newsletter folder – you’ll find it there no matter which client you use the next time you log in (See Figure 3).

Figure 3: One Inbox, Multiple Devices

Even more exciting is IMAP’s ability to save and manipulate various Status Flags for each message. Status flags let each device know if a message was read, answered, forwarded, or deleted on any other device. In that way you can reply to a message using a mobile device, and see that you did even when you log in later in the office (See Figure 4).

Figure 4: Message Status Flags

In that sense, IMAP offers true E-mail integration across multiple devices. Unlike POP3, with IMAP you truly have only one Inbox, which you can access and manage from anywhere. You can use Outlook in the office or at home, A pocket E-Mail client on your PDA/Smart Phone, and Web-Mail interface from any other machine. The information is always up-to date and at your fingertips.

Another great advantage of IMAP, which makes it popular among mobile and Smart Phone users, is the smart use it makes of bandwidth. Using IMAP, you can configure your client to download full messages, partial messages (say, only the text, or only a summary), or headers-only (See Figure 5). Downloading less than the full message allows you to download much faster, sort the messages and remove the irrelevant, and then download in full only important messages. This is ideal for dial-up connections which are very slow, or for cellular connections which sometimes charge per Kilobyte downloaded.

Figure 5: Smart Bandwidth Use

Are you still using POP3? To find out in Outlook, go to Tools -> E-Mail Accounts -> View or change existing accounts. You should see a list of all E-Mail accounts set up on your system. Under Type, look for POP/SMTP or IMAP/SMTP. Which will inform you which protocol you are currently using. If you’re interested in server-side mail storage, multiple-device access, or smarter bandwidth use – contact your ISP to find out if they offer IMAP access, and what is their storage capacity.

Whether you are an "E-Mail junky", or treat it as just one of many options; whether you use E-Mail for personal, work-related, or educational purposes – Better E-Mail is in your future. What kind of devices we’ll all use to read it 10 years from now we don’t know. But we do know that moving to IMAP is a first step to a more ubiquitous, easily accessible, and efficiently organized Inbox.