Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
quently use multiple devices—say, your Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad—to work
with your email.
• Even if your ISP or other email provider doesn't offer IMAP, you can almost cer-
tainly set up an IMAP account with another provider and then forward email
from your old address to the IMAP account. The fact that an ISP doesn't “sup-
port” IMAP doesn't prevent you from using IMAP from another provider.
I find it a bit bewildering that anyone still uses POP these days, but lots of people do, largely
out of habit. IMAP is a bit “chattier” and uses slightly more bandwidth, but in my own exper-
ience IMAP has performed well even on slow dial-up and cellular connections. Some IMAP
servers limit the amount of data you can store on the server, but if you run into such a lim-
it, it's usually possible to have it raised; to switch to another provider; or to archive some of
your messages locally by creating a local (“On My Mac”) mailbox, dragging messages or en-
tire mailboxes into that local mailbox in Mail's sidebar, and then deleting the server-based
copies.
The only argument for POP that I find vaguely persuasive is that it may reduce your suscept-
ibility to hacking or eavesdropping, because incoming messages stay on the server only un-
til you retrieve them. Of course, your email provider may keep indefinite backups of all in-
coming messages, and a government agency could monitor and capture all messages as they
come in, so I think this supposed advantage is largely illusory.
I can't think of any compelling reason to keep using POP in this day and age, especially with
so many robust IMAP servers and clients to choose from. IMAP gives you much more con-
venience and flexibility, while still enabling you to have a complete local copy of all your mes-
sages for offline access.
In short: If you're still using POP, I suggest switching to IMAP (or Exchange)—especially if
you use multiple devices to check your email.
Switch from POP to IMAP
Many mail servers allow both POP
and
IMAP to be used for retrieving email from the same
account, which can make it easy to switch from POP to IMAP. If you currently use POP, try
adding a second account to Mail with identical settings, except for an account type of IMAP
(see
Account Setup
for a tip on doing this):
•
If it works:
Look for any messages in your POP Inbox that aren't also in your
IMAP Inbox, and copy them there; also, if you have mailboxes that you created
to file your POP mail locally, copy those mailboxes to the IMAP server. Finally,
if you wish, delete the POP account from Mail.
