Poll HN: POP or IMAP?
For a new email service, which would you prefer?
1. I use Gmail apps for business, but unlike many people, I don't like the Gmail UI. I use a desktop client most of the time.
2. With Gmail + pop, I always have access to my email, but I can also make localized backups from my desktop client.
3. I don't trust that Gmail will retain my data forever or that I would never lose access to my account. I'm not paranoid about Google, but ultimately it's my responsibility to backup my mail data, not theirs.
If I recall correctly, moving an IMAP email message into a local directory that the IMAP account didn't know about deleted it from the server, which I did not want. But I had this huge local organizational structure for all my emails from multiple accounts, so I could either choose to exclude Gmail from this organization, reconfigure everything so that my brand-new, unproven Gmail account was the master account that controlled everything, or just turn on Gmail's POP mode and maintain the status quo.
Honest question: If I have multiple email accounts, some of which are IMAP and some of which are POP, that I organize with a mail client on my local machine into directories that mix mail from all the accounts (is it even possible?), then if I change the directory structure on the server of one of the IMAP accounts, what is supposed to happen to my local directory structure and all the non-IMAP-mail or IMAP-mail-from-other-accounts, that used to be in those directories?
They aren't two protocols for the same thing, they're two protcols for two very different kinds of service. Apples to oranges.
Disclosure: I am the project owner for above, half-way-dreamy about what else I could do to make it happen.
I would really like something like IMAP, but have it embrace gmail style "labels" instead of folders. When you use IMAP with Gmail, each label creates a duplicate of the message in its appropriate IMAP folder.
Right now I'm aware of sup and notmuch, but they are mailstores and indexes more than transport protocols.
IMAP pretty much supplanted POP. Most people nowadays use IMAP, unless they have some specific reason to use POP.
Other than that. I'm a bit shocked to read what I read in this thread. People who would want Gmail to support fetching emails from other mailboxes via IMAP rather than just POP3. I mean, it's only been a day or two since "PRISM" is not mentioned on the front page. I don't know who said that, but I read in a comment on HN that HN users and geeks in general will change their behavior because of Snowden's revelations, but that it will not affect the general public once the story will have cooled down, in a few weeks. Sadly, we have a proof here that HNers are just the same.
Just see this blog post for an idea:
http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2012/12/...
Edit: Can it really be true that there's no auto-discovery mechanism that works with IMAP and *DAV?
I did however try this, but it failed with the account I tried.
1. threaded email conversations supported natively
2. folders treated as gmail-like labels (essentially, tags)
3. advanced search and saved search queries supported natively
Also, an implementation better than Gmail's which does not have arbitrary limits on bandwidth/data used and number of connections.
Even with the rise of smart phones, and most people accessing email from multiple devices, IMAP is hard to grasp, and they use it basically like POP.
For myself, I have used IMAP since the late 90's. I have last several years of email available via IMAP, and the rest dating back to the 1994 in Mail.app
1) To download it to your local client (POP3?)
2) To access it from multiple clients (IMAP?)
3) To share it with other clients such as Gmail (Forward?)
4) To view it in the cloud (Proprietary?)
Nope. POP3 only. I am disappoint!
BTW, nice username. :-)
I know Gmail supports getting to its mail with IMAP.
For mail sent from my IMAP clients, I use "automatically BCC myself" thus ensuring a copy ends up at the POP client.
The more that is in the cloud, the happier I am
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act
At the end of the day, if you have information that you truly want to remain private, it cannot be turned over to a third party and should remain in your home.
the Similar softwares section is useful...
rsync might run into problems if you dl new messages before syncing (which I do all the time) but unison should work fine if you don't care about versioning.