IMAP vs POP Mail
 

I've been using POP since Steve Dorner sold Eudora as shareware from the U of Illinois. Years ago, when IMAP gained popularity, my ISP placed limits on the amount of mail you could store, so when I retired, I didn't switch. Somehow, I've always regarded mail messages and attachments downloaded to my machine (backed up through the day by Time Machine & part of a regular clone at 3AM daily) as more secure -- I didn't have to worry about my ISP dropping the ball somehow; everything I want to keep in on my machine.

When I migrated from Eudora to Mail (when Eudora 6.2 got a bit flakey, much as I loved it and used the scripts I'd written for it) I set up a POP account, replicated all of my original Eudora folders on my Mac, and added the filters necessary to replicate my old Eudora setup, so basically, to the extent possible, I've made Mail work like Eudora did. Old habits die hard.

Having said that, I realize that a well-executed and properly backed-up IMAP protocol is actually vastly superior -- for just one thing, I don't have to screen share to home when I'm away to read mail to the addresses kept there; I can just log on to the account from my laptop wherever it is. (Keeping POP mail on the server for a while is iffy; when I tried it some years ago, I'd run out of space.)

I haven't switched, however, for several reasons. First, I'd have to call my ISP (groan) to find out more about it; limits, server address, etc. which they conveniently don't list on their web site. Second, I'd have to figure out what to do with all the POP mail I've stored at home, and third, I'm not at all clear on how to configure Mail to deal with both the old and the new.

Anyone got some advice on this?

Let's assume the answers you get from your ISP are satisfactory. Configuration is pretty easy in Mail. You could add the IMAP account, and you could then disable the POP account. In Mail > Preferences > Accounts, you would select your POP account. In the Advanced section, simply de-select the option for "Enable This Account." This takes the POP account out of your regular mail checking, but it keeps all of the messages.

As for your folders of stored POP messages, this should be easy to transfer to the IMAP account. In the left sidebar of Mail should be a heading for both your IMAP account and your POP account. You can simply drag folders from the POP account to the IMAP account and they will be copied (or moved, I can't remember).

Of course, one of the keys to this is what you mentioned about how much space your ISP allows for IMAP mail storage. Personally, when I do large-scale Mail changes like this, I make a copy of ~/Library/Mail before doing anything. Yes, I do have backups, but I find it easier to revert if I have copied that Mail folder to the Desktop.

Thanks, NaOH; a good explanation. In the meantime I've discovered that my ISP provides 50MB of mail storage. My home-based Mail and Mail Attachments folders sum to nearly 400 MB. Clearly, users of IMAP (if this is typical) must occasionally download their stuff from the IMAP account to some other form of archiving. One feature of my setup that I like is that I can search all my old mail quite quickly, since it's an entirely local search.

Seems to me the trade-off is the ability to access your mail from any device anywhere, but I don't see a lot of other benefit.

That's an unfortunately small amount of storage they provide. It almost sounds like they're encouraging people who want IMAP to use something like Gmail which gives something like 7 GB of free storage.

As for your local search capability, here's a potential solution for you. You could only move select folders to your IMAP storage. Everything would remain searchable on your Mac, though you would lose some accessibility when accessing your Mail from other computers.

I guess another option — one that could understandably be viewed as less than ideal — would be to create a Gmail account for IMAP storage. Perhaps, then, you would store certain messages/folders on your main IMAP e-mail account, and store the other 300+ MB of e-mail on the Gmail account.

I do something similar. I have two IMAP accounts. One has very limited storage capacity, but it is my primary e-mail account. Messages which I always want accessible in that account are stored on that IMAP server. My secondary IMAP account stores messages I might want access to at any time. On top of that, messages which I'm not concerned with being able to access outside of my machine are kept in the "On My Mac" section in the Mail sidebar.

I don't think anything of this setup and it's amply convenient for me, but I could understand how someone would think that's inconvenient/not worth the hassle/an inane setup, etc.

Thanks again. Nice to know that 50MB is as small as I thought it was. I use GMail, but keep it generally separate from Mail and use MailPlane to access it (I like its interface, and its keyboard shortcuts). For the most part, I use GMail to exchange images and videos with my kids because I don't have to worry about storage limits. Because I don't really trust Google, however, nothing confidential goes through GMail in either direction. That lack of trust arises from the huge difference in the quantity of junk I receive -- on my POP accounts just a few pieces a day; on GMail several hundred.

Another potentially helpful tip that I should add comes from one of the built-in Mail commands. It seems like one that many people don't know exists.

In the Message menu is an option to Remove Attachments. I use this a bit because I don't necessarily need to save the attachment within a message since I have saved it to my hard drive. In a sense, we often end up with duplicate files if we don't use this feature.

If you send me an e-mail with Proposal.doc attached, I then save the attachment to my hard drive. The result is I have the file stored twice, once in Mail and once on my hard drive. Of course, if I want some attachment available no matter how I access my e-mail, this is not a command I use.

As an added bonus to this Mail feature, the e-mail gets an adjustment. In place of the removed attachment is placed text like this: Removed Attachment: Attachment.name

I should also note that the command is slightly surprising in how it behaves. It's a destructive command, but the user is never prompted before the command is executed. This seems odd to me since most destructive commands come with a prompt saying "Are you sure you want to remove this attachment?"

Interesting that you have a spam problem with Gmail when Google's spam filtering is usually highly regarded. I also have a Gmail account, but it basically goes unused and has never received one piece of junk in the six months I've had the account. I access it using Mail, but I prefer the setup as described in this article from TidBITS.

Your use of Gmail is a good demonstration of what I was saying earlier about the Remove Attachments command. If you're saving to the hard drive the images and/or videos that your kids are sending, the Remove Attachments would be helpful if storage were a concern for you.

I guess another, similar approach might be to create another Gmail account simply for IMAP storage within Mail. Were you to set the account up in Mail, you'd know that anything you stored on that account is only for making the messages accessible via IMAP when away from your Mac.

Again, that's just a thought. It's probably what I would do in your situation, but I could understand someone thinking that's too inconvenient/not worth it, etc. Of course, someone else might chime in with a different approach which better addresses your situation.

This is not a problem. My ISP has a similar limit. Apple Mail has an Account Info command that tells me how close I am to the quota. At some point I choose to get stuff off the server. That consists of nothing more than dragging messages from the IMAP mailbox to an "On My Mac" (local) mailbox. For example I might drag every message from December out of the IMAP inbox to a "December 2009" local mailbox.

As NaOH said, a key command is Remove Attachments, since those fill up the server space quota faster than anything else. After I file a big attachment where it needs to go on my Mac, I remove it from the message. Space is freed up on the server without having to remove the message itself. Or you can Save As from Mail which can save a message as RTF including the attachment, in case you want to put them in a non-Mail folder together.

For offline message access, I turn on the Mail IMAP preference "Keep copies of messages for offline viewing." This caches the server contents locally. This has a few implications. Since they are still on the server, I can get to them via webmail, iPhone, friend's computer, etc. If I can't get to the Internet or the mail server goes down, I still have the local copies and so just like POP I can read every single one when offline, and they also got backed up into Time Machine. Also since they are mirrored locally, they are picked up by Spotlight, so all mail is searchable - old and current.

I, too, migrated from Eudora, one of the nails in the Eudora coffin for me was it could not handle IMAP as well as Apple Mail. Now I've got IMAP working great on Apple Mail and I would never, ever go back to POP, or POP on Eudora.

That's a good point by styrafome that I didn't mention. When looking at any mailbox — essentially, as long as no messages are open, whether in the Inbox or those being composed — invoking the Command-I shortcut pulls up the Account Info window.** From that window, there is a pop-up menu which can be used to view the information any of the active accounts.

**I have no idea where that command exists within the menus. Manually looking for it and using the Help menu search field didn't reveal it either. I think the only reason I know of this feature is from accidentally having hit the keyboard shortcut at some point.

Thanks for your explanation, styrafome. The quote above gives me pause, though --- In particular the part I bolded. There's a story there.....

Ha ha ha, I went through the same thing while writing the post. I looked and looked and finally gave up. I can only ever remember hitting Command-I.

Don't know...all I meant by it is, once I dug around and found the settings I needed to change to create the experience I was looking for, I was happy, but those who have not yet put it all together tend to have similar doubts about perceived disadvantages of IMAP vs POP.

The GMail spam filter is very efficient; I have no complaints whatever. I wasn't clear that I meant by my comment the stuff that the spam filter trapped. 100 or so per day in GMail just a few in Mail.

ISPs are disposable. Your email address doesn't have to be. I keep telling all my clients that their mail should not be tied to an ISP because they'll have to change it if they decide to dump the ISP in favor of another, younger and better looking one. That's just one reason for getting a GMail account.

I agree. I do not know that gmail, yahoo, or msn will be around forever but they are not tied to an ISP.

All currently offer free versions and generous storage. At the moment gmail IMHO is the best. And IMAP is really the way to go to insure your mail is available on all devices and even the web.

You have to change ISPs when a better deal comes along or when you move. Changing email addresses while not impossible is like having to move. Better to use a provider that is not an ISP.

Where I live (a small city on the East coast of Canada), I have exactly two high speed connection choices: DSL from the local phone company or Cable. Since the cable company offers an attractive bundle: digital TV, Telephone and Internet (15Mb/sec) I've opted for that. Here, at least, they are not really "disposable".

You never know what the future will bring ISP wise. Also you never know when you might choose to move. Wedding your ISP and email address together limits your future choices.

None the less that choice is yours to make.

Add it all up, and the unspoken suggestion here is to get your own domain name. Unfortunately, it looks like www.novascotian.ca is already taken. But it looks like www.novascotian.com may be available.

A year or two from now, the phone company might start offering a better bundle for a lower fee than the cable provider ...or a completely new guy on the block might come to town. Who knows what's going to happen? These things change all the time :)

Having your own domain or tying your private identity to your employer can also be a problem. The former is merely an expense (a small one about $60 a year to keep a domain registered and to maintain an active site/domain to process your email). There are even options for email only domains. I am fond of machighway, but their are a million options. And of course tying your identity to an employer means you loose it when you move on.

I don't think it should be tied to Google either. In the 1990s everybody figured that an AOL or AltaVista email was as good as permanent...

The ultimate solution is to make your email "alias@yourpersonaldomain.com" . That's portable, you can take it with you from mail host to mail host so you're never trapped, yet the address your friends and family have never has to change.

If ones number 1 priority is never having to change their email address there can be no disagreement that owning a domain and paying a small sum to keep it active the best option.... Umm AOL still exists but that is an expensive option to maintain anyway:)

Interesting suggestion. I actually have a domain name (have had it for years) but I confess its primary use is for reaching home from away with various tools. I used to host a family web site, but unfortunately I've outlived some of the folks who were interested. DynDNS keeps track of the IP address associated with the name. I could, of course get my current ISP to host the name but haven't done it. In the event that I did choose a new ISP, I would probably do that. At this point, I don't even know how it's done.

Unless you have your own server and time it is easier to pay around $50 bucks a year to host your site on someone else's tuned Linux based web servers. I like mac highway, but there are a million choices.

You need not actually maintain a website to use the email. A hosted domain comes with email, ftp, and of course site hosting. It is completely goof proof.

I still for now prefer personally gmail since I do not know that my wife and I will choose to maintain our domain forever, even though the sums of money involved are minor.

Some people also use a mail-only account at an ISP, or even a mail-only ISP like Fastmail. That last option is probably not necessary unless you are very picky about how your mail is handled.

Hmm. Yes but Email only ISP tend to be a waste. Fastmail looked neat. They seem to have higher per hour mail send restrictions (better) then my current provider. There Web site hosting is inferior.

I would be willing to pay them just to process outbound mail.

Do they have a contact number or email address? I searched there site I could not find anything but forum support, similar to rapid weaver. One really nice thing about Mac highway is they have knowledgeable people that pick up the phone fast.