On Wednesday, February 16, 2005 at 5:30:39 PM [GMT -0500], Cees wrote: > I love the way you can explain things, you're very good at that!
Thanks bud! That's encouraging! <g>
> But...... to me this sounds just like the feature to "not delete
> messages at the server", so that you can indeed access your mail
> from various locations.
Ah. I knew you'd say that. :)
OK. What about message flagging? Such as a message being marked as
read, replied, forwarded, etc. What about flagging? What happens to
your replies and drafts?
Well, if I read 100 messages in TB! at home across 5 folders and reply
to 15 of them, I exit it when finished. I go to work and start
ThunderBird and ThunderBird syncs with the IMAP server. When finished,
ThunderBird will already have those 100 messages marked as read, the
ones I replied to will be flagged as replied. My replies will be
sitting pretty in the Sent folder. It's as if I was working all along
with ThunderBird. :)
Now, are you convinced and agree that leaving messages on the server
just doesn't cut it when you wish to create that *seamless* effect
when working with your mail at multiple locations and on different
machines using different TB! installations or even different clients?
:)
There's really no comparison. IMAP was developed and designed for just
this, since POP3 isn't appropriate. You can achieve something similar
with much gymnastics while using POP3. However, with IMAP, it just
works that way.
Of course, IMAP has its downsides, the two main ones being:
* Your mail is stored centrally on the IMAP server, so server space
can be an issue. GMail and Yahoo offer 1GB of space now and I run
my own mailserver ... not an issue for me or for others these
days.
* IMAP requires good bandwidth since you're constantly interacting
with the IMAP server to read mail etc. It's this bandwidth issue
that has me using ThunderBird at work. It's far more efficient
than TB! when using a slow connection. For many, this isn't such a
problem since DSL and cable are now pretty commonplace.
IMAP has been around for ages, but wasn't practical for many because
of those two main disadvantages. However, it's gaining popularity and
may well become as popularly used as POP over the upcoming years.
--
.. . . | IMAP Client: The Bat!™ v3.0.2.5
_.||* _ |\/| | IMAP Server: MDaemon Pro
(_]|||(/,____| | | OS: Windows XP Pro (Service Pack 2)
..... Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU.
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