On Feb 20, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Al wrote:
>> >> What Jim said. Rock solid and I'm getting my gmail account on three >> different macs and an iPod... >> > > Thanks guys. With IMAP, can I still download all the mail in one > transaction from all accounts into my Apple Mail Inbox? Yes, it's just another account to Mail. The difference between IMAP and POP is the location of the primary mail storage, that is where your 'Mail' lives. Lets use GMail as an example. With a POP account, it lives on your computer. You can leave the mail on the server for access by another computer, or webmail, but it is recognized as a separate copy. If you connect via the web version of Gmail, and delete a message form your inbox, the copy in your computer is NOT deleted. With an IMAP account it lives on the server. You can have a local copy cached on your computer, mainly for offline use, (see the Advanced settings for the IMAP account) but the official one is the one on the server. This means that if you delete an email from any computer looking at your IMAP inbox, the next time one of the other computers connects it will be gone AND the local cached copy will also be deleted. The advantage is that ALL mail clients that connect to your account always look at all your mail, there's never an issue of 'Oh crap, that email is on my desktop at home, so I cannot get to it here with my laptop.' Where I work we have LOTS of people with 3 or more computers that they use (Desktop at work, desktop at home, laptop(s) for the road, Blackberries, iPhones, Treo's, etc etc etc) and not all are amenable to using a web-based mail client. With an IMAP account you're never really away from all your mail, unless you cannot get to the internet. We started with IMAP when we set up our first email server even though the state of the client art was less than optimal (in 1994, basically, Netscape 4 was it, I must have tried 10 or 15 phenomenally ugly, poorly laid out, poorly working standalone email clients, none worked as well as Netscape. To this day we still use a mail client derived from that line, only it's Thunderbird, now) we went with IMAP because the hassles of juggling three computers and one POP account just wasn't practical. For an academic or business environment it's ideal..email represents a vital enterprise data store, so having email centralized is vastly superior from a data backup and retention point of view. Anyone using a web-based email client is doing essentially the same thing, it's just that using IMAP lets you use real email clients as well. -- Bruce Johnson "Wherever you go, there you are" B. Banzai, PhD --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to Low End Mac's iMac List, a group for those using G3, G4, G5, and Intel Core iMacs as well as Apple eMacs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to imaclist@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to imaclist-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
