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Poll HN: POP or IMAP?
For a new email service, which would you prefer?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- SkippyZA 13y agoIMAP is great. I am now having all my email address forward to Gmail and then use the Gmail app on iOS. The more that is in the cloud, the happier I am
- koralatov 13y agoAnd the more that is in the cloud, the happier the NSA are too. It's win-win!
- sixothree 13y agoDon't they consider email left on the server after a period of time to be abandoned and therefore they are able to read the contents 'legally'?
- Spooky23 13y agoEmail stored for less than 180 days requires a search warrant to access. But... email which is opened may be considered to be on the server "solely for the purpose of providing storage or computer processing services", in which case a court order (subpeona, etc) is required. Court orders are easier to get than search warrants. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoWhy POP? It's designed for "postboxes" which don't keep track of your mail and instead are brief holding areas to permanent storage on your computer. IMAP is instead designed for mail stored by your provider, where they permanently store it and keep track of it. They aren't two protocols for the same thing, they're two protcols for two very different kinds of service. Apples to oranges.
- jfb 13y agoA better question and a more interesting thought experiment would be "SMTP+IMAP or something new and better"?
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoYeah, then you'd be comparing apples to apples, so to speak.
- monsterix 13y agoSeen this: https://bubbleideas.com https://bubbleideas.com ? Disclosure: I am the project owner for above, half-way-dreamy about what else I could do to make it happen.
- hackmiester 13y agoHey, heads up, your SSL cert expired about 2.5 hours ago...
- monsterix 13y agoYes, fixed, thanks!
- TheMue 13y agoAlways IMAP (running my own server since several years). So the same mail on all devices, server-side pre-filtering into folders and central backup.
- zdw 13y agoWhy would anyone pick POP, other than as a poor-man's SMTP replacement for picking up mail off some other server and dumping it into another IMAP or other server-side mailbox system?
- toble 13y agoIf you don't like the idea of the 'cloud' and you check your email from a single device then POP's ideal - just depends on your requirements. I use IMAP though.
- jerf 13y agoIMAP can be used that way, too, so as far as I can tell it fully subsumes all practical POP use cases. (Perhaps there's some quirky case, whoknows, but let the people with the quirky cases worry about it.)
- jve 13y agoYou cannot track mail in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 from their Outlook plugin if you don't use POP3. Because the plugin can only track messages from default .pst file, but if I remember correctly, I coulndn't set IMAP data file as the default one.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tokenizerrr 13y agoThat sounds like it's a problem with Microsoft Dynamics CRM or their Outlook plugin, not IMAP.
- reflectiv 13y agoI agree...however it is still an issue one might take into account when deciding which protocol to use.
- nhebb 13y ago
- seanalltogether 13y agoI did everything on POP through the early and mid 2000s when most of my life was on one machine, but nowadays with multiple devices IMAP is the only way to go.
- BonoboBoner 13y agoI wish Gmail could use IMAP to fetch mails from other accounts.
- area51org 13y agoI just went to gmail, because I was just sure Gmail had this feature — if not before, then surely by now! Nope. POP3 only. I am disappoint! BTW, nice username. :-)
- SomeoneWeird 13y agoGmail definitely has IMAP.
- bti 13y agoI think Boner wants IMAP for fetching email from other email accounts. At the moment it can only do that with POP3.
- antonbabenko 13y agoThey have it, but not for fetching from other accounts.
- pgrote 13y agoWhere? I would love to pull multiple accounts into gmail. I know Gmail supports getting to its mail with IMAP.
- area51org 13y agoRight-hand-side gear pull-down menu: pick Settings. Then see Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
- jpswade 13y agoOutlook.com does not yet offer IMAP access, but it's OK because Gmail does support IMAP and can pull the mail via POP.
- at-fates-hands 13y agoI think they're pushing their Exchange ActiveSync in place of IMAP. Although I've heard rumblings it will be "coming soon", but with MS, "soon" usually means a few years.
- donatzsky 13y agoWell, considering their general attitude towards IMAP (and other EAS rivals such as CalDAV and CardDAV), I certainly wouldn't hold my breath. Just see this blog post for an idea: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2012/12/17/outlook.com-supports-exchange-active-sync-for-the-best-email-experience-across-devices-.aspx 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?
- bonyt 13y agoReally? My school system is from outlook.com and it supports IMAP, there was a value in settings that showed which IMAP server to use, it was apparently podXXXXX.outlook.com (with some set of numbers, not Xs) - but it's not the normal outlook.com interface, it looks like Outlook Web Access, so I don't know if it's some education-only thing or something. On a side note, it also set my password for me (it's an ID number!) and doesn't let me change it...
- jpswade 13y agoThere is this: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/settings-for-pop-and-imap-access-HA102908389.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/settings-for-... I did however try this, but it failed with the account I tried.
- Ologn 13y agoIf you leave mail on your mail server, and are fetching mail over a WAN, with IMAP you only fetch messages with a higher ("newer") unique ID on each connection. With POP, you scan the entire map of unique identifiers each connection. With a large mailbox and a relatively slow WAN connection, this creates a significant overhead with POP. IMAP pretty much supplanted POP. Most people nowadays use IMAP, unless they have some specific reason to use POP.
- leejoramo 13y agoI voted for both, despite the fact that I use IMAP myself. It has been my experience that most of my clients, have a real hard time understanding IMAP. Most of them don't organize their email more than INBOX & SENT. This is especially true when you have a cap on file space on IMAP, the idea that you need to archive email on your own computer become very difficult for people to understand. 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
- jerogarcia 13y agopop!!!! haha
- circa 13y agoI just fixed a client's computer where her old Outlook was exceeding 2GB using POP. It drove me crazy just converting to the new Outlook 2010 and then she had doubles of everything from the past 2 weeks. Its crazy to me that some businesses still use it.
- p4bl0 13y agoIMAP can be seen as a superset of POP (in terms of features). Tools like offlineimap prove it. 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.
- pseut 13y agoMaildir w/ git for syncing across computers. Robust and fast as hell.
- rswail 13y agoWhy git and not rsync?
- pseut 13y agoSometimes (rarely) I plan to revise a long email and want the drafts versioned. I also keep config files (e.g. .muttrc) and some longer reports in the same parent directory (letters of recommendation, short essays, etc) and I want those files versioned for sure. 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.
- martin-adams 13y agoFeels like the wrong question to me. How about, for a new email service would you prefer... 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?)
- nailer 13y agoPush IMAP.
- k2enemy 13y agoMy vote is for option 3. 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.
- ravisarma 13y agoNot to be combative, but shouldn't you be asking Google to fix their broken IMAP?
- k2enemy 13y agoI'm not sure, as I don't know IMAP very well. Is there a way that Google can send information about labels via the IMAP protocol without creating a duplicate message for each label? I guess they could add an email header with the labels, but that would modify the actual email.
- saurik 13y agoThe reason Gmail's IMAP is built the way it is is not because it maps well the semantics of Gmail to IMAP, but because it provided a reasonable way to access the semantics of Gmail using the semantics of Outlook. IMAP supports labels on messages in the form of user-defined flags; Gmail is really a single massive mailbox (what Outlook represents as a folder) with tons of flags. Most IMAP clients, however, suck at indexing flags, barely even let the user see and edit flags, sometimes only supporting five flags... it would have been useless.
- hamburger1984 13y agoHTTP
- lazylizard 13y agohttp://imapsync.lamiral.info/ http://imapsync.lamiral.info/ the Similar softwares section is useful...
- chmars 13y agoIMAP of course, but not with the default mail app of BlackBerry 10: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060630 SCNR
- finnh 13y agoPOP for the "authoritative copy" downloaded to my desktop; IMAP for devices to see "what's new since I was last at my desk". POP is signficantly faster than IMAP for the former - no extraneous folder scans, no slow UUID syncs.
- benedikt 13y agoSeems like you have a similar use-case as me. How do you deal with sent messages between the POP client and the IMAP clients? How and where do you store the authorative copies of the sent mail?
- finnh 13y agoI use Google Apps as my server, which collects into "Sent Items" any email I sent from the POP client (and makes them available over IMAP should I need them). For mail sent from my IMAP clients, I use "automatically BCC myself" thus ensuring a copy ends up at the POP client.
- MikeDawg 13y agoDoes anyone use POP anymore?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nirajr 13y agoIMAP, with enhancements like: 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.