Poll HN: POP or IMAP?

[_urga]

For a new email service, which would you prefer?

[zdw]

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?

[nhebb]

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.

[GrantS]

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?

[jerf]

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.)

[toble]

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.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

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.

[jfb]

A better question and a more interesting thought experiment would be "SMTP+IMAP or something new and better"?

[k2enemy]

My 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]

Not to be combative, but shouldn't you be asking Google to fix their broken IMAP?

[Ologn]

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.

[p4bl0]

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.

[seanalltogether]

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.

[jpswade]

Outlook.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]

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.

[bonyt]

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...

[nirajr]

IMAP, 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.

[circa]

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.

[leejoramo]

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

[martin-adams]

Feels 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?)

[BonoboBoner]

I wish Gmail could use IMAP to fetch mails from other accounts.

[area51org]

I 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. :-)

[finnh]

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.

[benedikt]

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?

[chmars]

IMAP of course, but not with the default mail app of BlackBerry 10:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060630 SCNR

[TheMue]

Always IMAP (running my own server since several years). So the same mail on all devices, server-side pre-filtering into folders and central backup.

[SkippyZA]

IMAP 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]

And the more that is in the cloud, the happier the NSA are too. It's win-win!

[lazylizard]

http://imapsync.lamiral.info/

the Similar softwares section is useful...

[pseut]

Maildir w/ git for syncing across computers. Robust and fast as hell.

[rswail]

Why git and not rsync?