Would any of tech experts here mind helping me figure out the best strategy for retrieving and organizing my email? It’s a good time for me to find a new host for my website and I’m not sure if I should go with IMAP or POP, or how best to get my laptop and phone well synced. What I currently do:
My primary email account is POP and I have second email that’s IMAP. Using Mac Mail (v 6.3) on the laptop (10.8.3) and also use an iPhone (6.1.3). What I’d like to do: 1. Have the phone and Mac Mail sync well:
The POP account doesn’t sync with the phone very well – if I read/reply/delete on the phone, the email in Mac Mail is unaffected, and vice versa.
The IMAP account syncs partially – if I delete an email on the phone, it then deletes in Mac Mail. But – new emails and replies created on the phone don’t show up in Mac Mail on the laptop.
So it seems that IMAP is better for syncing? If so, one point for IMAP. 2. Retrieve old emails from the phone:
I would like to be able to access all old emails when I’m away from the laptop. The webmail for both of my emails is very limited (hostgator and ipower are the hosts) – the old messages don’t stay on the server and the interfaces are clunky at best.
I’m experimenting right now with using a Gmail account as a fetcher for the POP account, which seems to be working pretty well. Since POP is required for Gmail (I think), it seems that POP may be better for online access to old emails? If so, one point for POP.
So what say you, great tech minds? (I’m leaning toward keeping POP with the new host…)
POP is a mail retrieval protocol, used for collecting emails from a small mailbox and then storing it in a mail client. It is designed to allow header download, server based deletion and selection/download/removal. It does not support multiple client access, and was intended for dialup and low bandwidth use.
IMAP is an email access protocol, used to access emails stored in a permanent mailbox on a server. It supports access from multiple clients, and has a variety of email management features. It is far superior and much more capable than POP. It is almost always the correct choice.
One of the very few things I hate about Thunderbird is that its automatic server setup is very difficult to override, either during account creation or later. Because my email usage has always been complex and is getting complexer right now, I’d like to try IMAP for my major accounts. But if there’s a way to set up an account for IMAP (before the automatic process sets it up as POP3), or a way to change an account to IMAP later, I can’t find it.
The only issue I have had with Thunderbird is convincing the setup that I am using a gmail address (as a reply to) with a private server. And my setup is pretty complex, with IMAPS and private certificates and all. I’ve never had it try to set up POP, though.
Missed the edit: I just checked, and it appears they’ve improved the account setup method. The last time I tried it, it was somewhere between impossible and requiring of superhuman reflexes to hit the “manual configuration” button before the automatic process decides, By Gum, that you’re going to get a POP3 account. I was able to easily hit the manual and set up the account.
Now I just have to think about converting eleven active accounts… sigh.
Ninja followup: I’m not trying to set up a GMail account. I have one because you can’t function (especially in the Android world) without one, but my accounts are all on private hosting. For whatever reason, they’ve always quickly defaulted to POP3.
No one has commented on this. OP check your settings and see what server you use to send the mail out on your phone. For example if you are using the cell phone company to send out email, then it is not going to show up on Mac Mail. You would need to use the Macmail server to send out email for it to show up on Mac Mail.
Pop3 don’t forget to turn on the Leave e-mail messages on your e-mail server option. By default messages are deleted off the email server. That can ruin your office email if you also read it from home. Office email is supposed to be on the machine at work and not stuck on your home pc.
This is a client setting, nothing to do with the outgoing SMTP server. You need to ensure that all the clients use the same IMAP folder for Trash and Sent Mail - most clients tend to use local folders by default, which is rubbish.
I use IMAP for my main mail accounts, and I really like it, but beware… at least twice over the last few years, I have had something (some unknown something) happen that wiped my inbox on the server. Since all my machines are synced, this resulted in all my messages in the inbox on all my devices getting wiped, too.
I use Time Machine to back up my systems, so rebuilding my mail wasn’t too hard, but I did lose a bunch of messages that day (they came in between backup intervals and the unexplained event).
So be careful - if your email is important to you, keep a local copy, in addition to the copy on the server.
(As an aside, I had a client have this happen to her, too. But in her case, I figured out what was happening. Turns out, she somehow launched Outlook, and it was set to use POP, with the same server parameters. So, it dutifully downloaded all of her email, and then deleted it from the server, which wiped everything in her mail Inbox.)
My method is to turn off “Delete messages” on all clients except one master, which is set to delete messages on the server after 7 days. For all the advantages of IMAP, this has worked well, allows me to delete messages from my phone with impunity and provides a degree of automatic backup among the clients.
The bottom line is that I don’t trust a third-party server with any of my data, email especially. I’d rather pull in, manage and archive it myself.
I know this is a really old thread, but for once Discourse was right in saying that there are several existing threads on the same topic, so let me throw this in here and revive this zombie.
I’m helping someone migrate their primary business computer from Windows 7 and Office 2007 to Windows 11 and Office 2021. They formerly used POP3 to access their Gmail server and I was inclined to set up Outlook 2021 the same way, but two things convinced me to go with IMAP instead:
Outlook 2021, which supports the new OAuth 2.0 authentication protocol, only supports it for IMAP as far as I can tell. When setting it up to use POP3, the connection fails unless you use the specially generated “app password”. This suggests that Microsoft has more or less deprecated POP3 (Thunderbird does allow OAuth 2 with POP3).
I found that Google is going to discontinue support for app passwords for Google Workspace as of Sep 30, which suggests that they will also be disabled for Gmail at some point.
So I conclude from this that IMAP is the right way to go.
Well, email is not just “important” here, it’s the lifeblood of the business. The normal operating mode here is to download emails from the server (formerly using POP3) but leave them on the server for a year or so as a backup. On the local computer, emails are moved from the Outlook Inbox to specific client folders.
I understand that with IMAP, if emails are deleted from a local device they are also deleted from the server. Important question: Will the process of moving them from Outlook’s Inbox to another folder also delete them from the server? This would be one of the undesirable effects of IMAP. Preservation of the emails is critical. They do regular backups of course but if emails keep getting deleted from the server, in the event of a crash they’d lose emails since the last backup.
If you create a folder on the server, then moving messages from the inbox to a folder will simply move them. The folders on the server will appear (or be available) on all synced devices. So, that’s a pretty safe thing to do.
Right, but the question was what happens if you move emails from the Outlook Inbox (which AIUI is not local storage any more as with POP3, but just reflects the contents of the email server) into a local Outlook folder. Are they then downloaded and deleted from the server?
The question is easy enough to answer just by trying it but I’m not there and have just been helping over the phone with initial setup of the new computer. I’m just trying to better understand how IMAP works so I’m better prepared when I go over there for the actual migration to the new computer.
The use case here is almost entirely local processing, which makes the IMAP choice sorta iffy, but necessary for reasons of compatibility and support with POP3 apparently being deprecated. There are many dozens of gigantic local Outlook PST files containing hundreds of gigabytes of information.
I still have my main Comcast email accounts set up with POP3 using the latest version of Outlook for the Mac. This is because I want to be able to download emails and archive them myself instead of trusting them to be maintained on a remote server.
I also have things set up to never delete emails on the server side, so I can download emails on my iPhone, iPad, desktop computer, and laptop.
The downside is that I have to delete spam emails multiple times, and if I set up folders on my desktop they are not duplicated on my laptop. For these reasons, I should probably switch to IMAP at some point, but will probably only do this if I’m forced to.
Help! My friend and I have managed to get the email on their new computer somewhat functional but the quirks of IMAP and perhaps also quirks of Outlook are driving me crazy. To reiterate, this is Microsoft Outlook 2021 Classic using IMAP to access Gmail. We have to use IMAP because Outlook doesn’t support OAuth 2.0 authorization with POP3.
I’d appreciate it if anyone could shed some light on these two peculiar behaviours – I cannot figure out if this is something peculiar to Outlook or to Gmail or to IMAP but it’s weird and frustrating …
Sent emails do not go to the “Sent” folder as they normally would; they show up in the Inbox instead. Microsoft offers an option to “prevent ‘Sent’ emails from appearing twice” which was enabled. If disabled, “Sent” emails do now appear in the “Sent” folder, but the continue to appear in “Inbox” which is stupid and inconvenient.
When Outlook saves a draft, the draft is nowhere to be found. It turns out that it’s saved on the Gmail server, but not locally where it’s actually needed! If this is how IMAP works, it sucks.
I find this useful, as it allows me to start an email on one device and, if necessary, finish it later on a different device. So there is some rationale behind it.
I’m not familiar with how Gmail and Outlook interact. Does Outlook give you access to all the Gmail folders? Is one of them Gmail’s drafts folder? If so, you can make it a “favorite” in Outlook to make it easier to access.