I've recently become an IMAP "convert" when dealing with my email. What's IMAP, and what the heck is POP as well, you say?

Okay, we'll start out with definitions:

IMAP – Internet Mail Access Protocol
POP – Post Office Protocol

Great, you say… I still have no idea what you are talking about!

The differences lie in how you want to access your email. I'll talk about POP first as it's the one most people are familiar with. POP is the older of the two technologies and in a nutshell typically retrieves all messages from a user's email server and downloads them onto their local computer. There are options in most email client programs (Outlook and Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Apple's Mail, etc) to leave a copy of the messages on the server. The POP standard was created for email users with intermittent connections to their email server, such as dial-up users. These users needed to get their email off the server onto a computer that may not have access at a later time or (remember this?) when you only had a certain amount of minutes per month of Internet access and didn't want to waste it retrieving email.

IMAP on the other hand keeps all the email messages on the email server as well as the "state" of the message, but we'll talk more about that in a minute. IMAP is typically used in environments where the end user has a constant connection to their email server (broadband internet and corporate networks being just two examples). The advantages over POP is that all message information is stored on the email server. This means that when a message is 'read' the server knows it has been read. "Great, what does that do for me?" you may ask. This is where IMAP starts to separate from it's POP counterpart. In an environment where multiple users need to access the same email box, this feature communicates the fact that someone has read the email message. An example would be a technical support team where support emails are sent to a "support@thecompany.com" email address, or maybe a sales force with an email of "sales@thecompany.com". The team of users at the company knows that someone has read that message and is handling it.

Now we're at the reason I like and have switched to IMAP, and that's the ability to manage my email from more than one computer. My business day typically involves me bouncing back and forth between my desktop PC and my laptop. When I am on site at a customer's location I wanted to have my email with me. They way I had accomplished this in the past was to set my desktop PC's email client to "leave a copy of messages on the server" and then later on download (remove the copies from the server) those messages onto my laptop before I left the office. Sounds simple enough. The problem I had was sometimes, typically on the weekends or at night, I would use my laptop and check my email. This would of course download the messages and remove them from my email server. This means that later on I was not able to retrieve them from the desktop PC. I could of course set the laptop to also leave a copy of the messages on the server, but didn't want to do that.

To me the benefit of IMAP is that it gives me a "webmail" like experience with the ability to have my own email domain. We're all familiar with webmail hosts like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc. It's however, a little unprofessional to hand someone a card with "jason@insertwebmailhosthere.com" on it. With IMAP I now have the ability to centrally manage my email messages.

Is IMAP for you? Do you typically use just one computer to access your email? Does only one person need access the email account? If you answered yes to either of those questions, then IMAP is probably not for you. If you use a dial-up connection to the Internet, then this would be another reason to not use IMAP, especially if your connection is less than stable. Finally, not all Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, offer IMAP access.

Are you a small business and want to know if you should be using IMAP? If so, contact Turcotte Data & Designs today and we can help you determine what is right for your users.

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