Email 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.
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.
Why 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.
Why 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?
If 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.
IMAP 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.)
You 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.
I use POP with the "leave a copy on the server" option. Why would I do this?
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.
I think the problem with IMAP, for a lot of users, is that many clients don't keep a complete local copy of your e-mail store by default, and they don't realise that it can do that.
I use POP because of inertia: When I first set up a Gmail account in 2004, I tried IMAP and it behaved in unexpected ways when organizing mail locally with my other POP accounts, so I switched it to POP and have never really had a reason to revisit that decision.
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?
I 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.
I 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.
Really? 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...
If 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.
I 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
I 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.
IMAP 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.
Sometimes (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.
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.
I'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.
The 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.
POP 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.
Seems 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?
I 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.
63 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 73.3 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
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.
[1]: http://offlineimap.org/
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?
Nope. POP3 only. I am disappoint!
BTW, nice username. :-)
I know Gmail supports getting to its mail with IMAP.
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.
IMAP pretty much supplanted POP. Most people nowadays use IMAP, unless they have some specific reason to use POP.
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
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.
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.
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?)
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.
the Similar softwares section is useful...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060630 SCNR
For mail sent from my IMAP clients, I use "automatically BCC myself" thus ensuring a copy ends up at the POP client.
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.