Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
means moving it to a Trash or Deleted Messages mailbox, which you can then empty manu-
ally or have your email client empty on a preset schedule.
The biggest advantage of IMAP is that you can view your email using any client, on any
device, and you will always see exactly the same thing. So, you can access a single email ac-
count on your iPad, your iPhone, your Mac (using, say, Apple Mail) and your PC (using, say,
Microsoft Outlook), and all your mailboxes, sent and saved messages, read/unread status,
and so on will look exactly the same, all the time, in all those places. (Many IMAP accounts
also provide a Web-based client.) In other words, unlike POP, IMAP imposes no penalty for
checking your mail from more than one device.
Mail and IMAP Subscriptions
Most IMAP clients let you select which of the stored mailboxes on the server you want
to see in your local mailbox list, a process known as
subscribing
. But Mail in Mavericks
does not, for the most part, understand the concept of subscriptions—with one excep-
tion, it simply shows you all the mailboxes that are on the server, all the time.
If you choose Get Account Info from the pop-up Action menu at the bottom of
Mail's sidebar, and then click Subscription List in the Account Info window, you'll see a
list of mailboxes to which you can subscribe or unsubscribe—use the pop-up Accounts
menu at the top to switch between accounts. (Don't see the sidebar? Choose View >
Show Mailbox List.) But usually this list is blank; it shows only mailboxes in “Public” or
“Shared” folders on the server, if such folders exist (which is rarely the case).
iCloud, AOL, and Yahoo (among other providers) use IMAP by default for incoming email,
although they may do some additional sneaky things in the background that aren't entirely
standard. (I say a bit more about this in
Fetch, Push, and IMAP IDLE
,
later in this chapter.)
Gmail (see
Gmail
, ahead) uses a specially wacky version of IMAP.
Microsoft Exchange servers can be configured to support IMAP, though for various reasons,
many Exchange-server administrators choose not to enable IMAP support. The much better,
and more common, way to access an Exchange server on a Mac or iOS device is to use Ex-
change Web Services (in OS X) or Exchange ActiveSync (in iOS), both of which I describe
next.
