|
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.
Figure 1:
E-Mail Protocols
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.
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.
|
