E-mail paradigm shift: From IMAP to POP on the clichéd wings of Thunderbird
I've been accessing my main e-mail account via IMAP for years now. With IMAP, the mail stays on the server, and the mail client brings down the headers and then any messages necessary. That way I can go anywhere, use any computer and have access to that mail with another mail program, or use the same mail server's Web interface to check up on my latest messages.
My main mail client (or I could just say "program," like I did in the last paragraph to make it simpler) is Thunderbird. I can't say I'm deliriously happy with Thunderbird. One reason I use it is that it's available for Windows and Unix/Linux, so I can use it in any of the hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions, in any BSD system, on my Windows box at work, and even on Mac OS if I felt like it (I don't).
Anyhow, I'm not feeling so good lately about leaving my mail on the server. I generally filter quite a bit of it (Thunderbird is great with filters, by the way) down to the local drive anyway, and now I want all of my mail off of a server I don't control and onto a system (or systems) I do control.
Hence POP, or Post Office Protocol, which reigned supreme in the pre-broadband days when people didn't stay connected to their mail server all the time. Back in the day, a user would dial up with a telephone modem, grab their mail with POP, have any mail they composed offline sent, and then read new mail at their leisure, connecting again later to send additional messages.
I just POP-ped down (is it really POP-ped?) a few thousand messages, and for now I'll just say that moving a complicated heap of mail in folders down via POP is messy and nearly undoable. And the mail server in question, at any rate, isn't happy about mass downloads of mail all at once to the local drive.
I lost more than a few messages, I think (it's hard to tell), but I'm glad to have all of that mail off the server.
Meanwhile, I've been using Thunderbird heavily in OpenBSD 4.4, and whether due to the OS or the app, the mail client is running way better here than in Windows. Everything is happening very quickly with no glitches.
Truth time: All of this gives me a very warm feeling about the Web-based e-mail services I also use every day: Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail. Both of these have given me way less trouble than IMAP, POP and traditional mail clients ever have. (And for the moment I'll forgive Yahoo for the problems I'm having with their "new" mail interface and Google's Chrome browser ... can't compose an e-mail that way; I hope they're working on it.)
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
You might have had better luck copying messages in batches of a few hundred at a time to local folders rather than grabbing them all at once with POP.
You left out a notable benefit of IMAP, which is the ability to use multiple devices at the same time to get and send new e-mail from the same accounts.
In my case, I have a laptop (running Fedora 10) that is generally always connected to the net. I use T-Bird to get e-mail from both work (using Zimbra) and personal (Gmail) e-mail accounts using IMAP. The laptop is my primary platform.
When I get the e-mails, they go into a primary Inbox for each account and then are filtered into categorized folders (eg. Gmail labels). From there, I either delete them or move them to *local* folders if I need to save them for later use. I don't leave e-mails on the server for long periods of time.
I also have a smartphone that is similarly always connected to the net and checks the same two e-mail accounts, also using IMAP. I can get new e-mails on my phone, even when the laptop is still connected (I don't have to remember to logout of the laptop when I will be away). There is no conflict and I have not had an instance, using my phone, where I have needed to go back to an e-mail that is on my laptop in a local folder and no longer on the server.
If I used POP and removed the e-mail from the server on one device or the other, I would miss new e-mails on the other device.
If I used the web based clients only, leaving the e-mail on the servers, I would not be able to access e-mails when not connected to the net, which given past experience, would be a significant problem, especially for work related e-mails.
For me at least, using IMAP has been a significant benefit when using multiple devices.
I've used IMAP the same way, meaning to access the same e-mail account from multiple computers and applications. But now if I need that kind of access, it's just better — for me anyway — to access the account with a Web interface and not deal with client software at all.