Email: Explained (POP vs IMAP)

I get lots of questions about how to setup email. While the software vendors have made this a pretty painless endeavor these days the consumer still needs to know a bit to accomplish the behavior they desire.

First off for those people that are still on CompuServe or AOL. End your subscription and get one of the many great free email services that exist. I've used all the major ones since their creation (HotMail, Yahoo, Gmail). And the reason that I use them is not because they are free. It's because simply they are better than any other web interface for sending email that is available (paid or otherwise). My personal preference is Gmail because the search is excellent and the interface is minimal. But they all provide very generous storage, excellent interfaces and POP and IMAP access (more on this later).

Gmail even has a free hosted option if you want to have a personalized domain name such as myemail@widgetsforsale.com . You can set those up here if you have an existing domain name or if you purchase one through them.

Once you have one of these great options. Now you need to know about POP and IMAP. These are the different protocols for accessing (not sending) your email. POP is old but most widely used. POP simply provides the emails as is to the client. However if you have multiple computers which you use Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird on and you use POP then it will not preserve your read marks. It will simply download all the mail every time you fetch it.

If you get a significant amount of mail. Resorting it every time you sit on different computers is too much of a pain. IMAP is the solution for you. It maintains your read marks whether you check it on your phone, laptop or desktop. It also maintains your folders. So if you are one of those organizers then this is a must have. (you'll need to indicate which folders you want to synchronize on the client that you use).

Why use a desktop client? Well several reasons:

• You can't paste an image into the body of an email on any of the online web clients.
• You can't integrate with Outlook calendar or other clients calendar solutions.
• You can't drag highlight multiple emails and move or delete them (Yahoo is an exception here)
• You can't work offline on a plane

As Silverlight and Flash get better these differences will disappear and there will be no super compleing reason to not simply use an online client. But for now if the online client does what you need it to use that.

If it does not then my suggestion is to use one of the free email providers for your email and setup Outlook or Thunderbird with IMAP so that you can preserve your folders and "read marks" and stars.

Ignore the default setup of Thunderbird and configure it manually because it will use POP by default if you select that option. Here is a video of how to set it up.

If you already have Outlook I would suggest using it because it has calendar and contacts built in.

If you start using thunderbird or Outlook you may find yourself irritated that you don't' have all the contacts that autocomplete when you are using your web client. If you are using Gmail there is a solution, but it's not for the faint of heart that don't like to follow instructions. But if you're willing to simply follow the readme you'll be fine.

http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/usage4.html

Please post any comments or suggestions you have for another article.