Tricks and tips for using IMAP mail?
Watch your spam folder (if you have one), because if you don’t clean it out regularly, it might cause you to exceed your disk storage quota. In fact, the disk quota was my biggest problem with IMAP, since it was pretty small relative to modern hard drives. A large photo attachment would take up a not insignificant portion of it, and I had to come up with an archive solution, which was not a good use of time.
On Windows, you’ll find IMAPSize quite handy for detaching attachments to a local disk in order to economize on server disk space.
I’m having trouble getting my pine and Thunderbird clients to see the folders I set up with Eudora. IMAP has the concept of a “folder path”, which decides the root of the folder tree that your client displays. Sometimes, depending on the server software, this must be set explicitly in the client configuration. You should ask your ISP what the correct setting is, or you could try setting it to INBOX, which is a common setting; this means all your folders are attached as sub-folders of the inbox folder. (In Thunderbird, that’s Tools, Account Settings, Server Settings under your account, then the Advanced button, and in the dialog that comes up, type the path into the “IMAP server directory” box.) As for tips and warnings, make sure you enable your client’s offline support, so that you can read your mail even your connection is down. Thunderbird and Outlook come with offline support built in. In Thunderbird, go into the account settings, Offline & Disk Space entry, an enable the feature.
