How I learned to stop POP'ing and love IMAP

I’ve been using IMAP to read my mail for over a year now, but it’s been a year marred by poor performance from hosts, and even poorer support from mail clients. Despite its superiority to POP (if you don’t know why IMAP is superior then you’ve been living under a rock), I found myself continually struggling with the best way to make IMAP fit into my workflow.

That said, here’s what I do now.

• I host with Textdrive. Simply, I find them unrivaled in the hosting industry. (tip: TxD lets you use IMAP over SSL).
• I often use my Mac, Windows, and Linux and in all cases, I read my mail with Thunderbird. Its support for IMAP is fantastic on all platforms.
• I use a Local mail directory on my ‘main’ computer as my master repository for mail, and it’s here that I keep subdirectories for sorting, etc.
• I use IMAP to access any of my mail accounts, and retain the default folder layout (inbox, trash, drafts, sent)
• Every few days when I’m on my ‘main’ computer (the mail repository), I move my IMAP messages older than 5 days, to my Local folder, and sort the mail as I see fit.

The result is that I have my most recent Inbox, Sent, Draft, and Trashed files available from any computer, at any time, via an IMAP client (like Thunderbird or Mail), or via any web browser with Webmail (my favorite is SquirrelMail). A sort of ‘referential integrity’ is also maintained quite nicely—for example: if you send a message from California using SquirrelMail, when you get back to work, you’ll find that message in your Sent folder.

You can refine your sorting measures too: on my main computer, I’ve set my preferences to always copy my Sent mail to my Local Folders, rather than leave it accessible via IMAP. I really only want messages I send remotely to remain on the server. I also use a Filter to show me only messages older than 5 days which I apply to all my IMAP folders. This gives me a quick view of ‘old’ messages that I should move to my Local repository and file away! (You might even find that you rarely need to read mail older than 5 days anyway).

So there.

• By Jeffrey Hardy on
• May 11, 12:52 PM