What is IMAP?
More people today are traveling more than ever before. This is certainly true of businesspeople, who, with the help of laptops and PDAs and mobile phones, can take their work with them easily. Even email is easy to transport, thanks to modern technology that creates email access even on mobile phones. This kind of email access would not be possible without Internet Message Access Protocol, or IMAP. This kind of technology enables people to send and receive email via a central server, without having to maintain email on a certain device. IMAP is especially valuable for travelers who might have an email “home base” of a desktop computer at their home or office but wish to access email while on the road. The principle behind IMAP is that a client’s email is stored on a central server. The client can then access a copy of the email on his or her personal device. Even emails sent from that personal device are routed through the central server, which keeps a record of them. Some email progra
IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol, lets you download messages from Gmail’s servers onto your computer so you can access your mail with a program like Microsoft Outlook Express or Apple Mail, even when you aren’t connected to the Internet. IMAP creates a constant connection between mail clients (desktop and/or mobile) and Gmail. What’s the difference between IMAP and POP? Unlike POP, IMAP offers two-way communication between your web Gmail and your email client(s). This means when you log in to Gmail using a web browser, actions you perform on email clients and mobile devices (ex: putting mail in a ‘work’ folder) will instantly and automatically appear in Gmail (ex: it will already have a ‘work’ label on that email the next time you sign in). IMAP also provides a better method to access your mail from multiple devices. If you check your email at work, on your mobile phone, and again at home, IMAP ensures that new mail is accessible from any device at any given time. Finally, IMA
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is a method of accessing electronic mail or bulletin board messages that are kept on a (possibly shared) mail server. In other words, it permits a “client” e-mail program to access remote messages stored as if they were local. For example, e-mail stored on an IMAP server can be manipulated from a desktop computer at home, a workstation at the office, and a notebook computer while traveling, without the need to transfer messages or files back and forth between these computers. IMAP’s ability to access messages (both new and saved) from more than one computer has become extremely important as reliance on electronic messaging and use of multiple computers increase. The protocol includes operations for creating, deleting, and renaming mailboxes; checking for new messages; permanently removing messages; setting and clearing flags; server-based RFC-822 and MIME parsing (so clients don’t need to), and searching; and selective fetching of me
