These past two weeks I've been trying to get things squared away w/ NCSU, learning some of the new tech kids use nowadays (like ePack, the WolfWare stuff, etc). Just about everyone I've talked to tells me I should switch over to IMAP for all of my email. "It's so much easier!", "Access email everywhere!", "it's teh wins!", etc etc etc

Is that an accurate assessment, or should I stick with POP?

Here are my concerns over switching...

-= Storage =-
I like having all of my email on my computer. Especially with Spotlight on MacOS X, searching through the bits and pieces going back to 1998 makes life easier when it comes to finding things.

All of it would take up a few gigs of server space if I went the IMAP route, would it not? (my current mailbox size w/ attachments comes out to 3GBs)

-= Security =-
I don't like the idea of someone potentially hacking into a mail server and extracting shit, like in the current Webmail notice that went out about an hour ago. If everything's stored on a local machine that I can physically secure, even if the mail server gets hacked they won't have anything there to access.

What makes IMAP more secure that POP?


[Edited on August 9, 2005 at 4:07 PM. Reason : ---]

8/9/2005 4:05:29 PM

I like IMAP because I can access my email from any computer. Also, i use outlook, and it downloads all of my emails to my computer (I can access all of my emails offline, whenever I want.)

8/9/2005 4:11:00 PM

both have their ups and downs.

8/9/2005 4:13:24 PM

You can set up Mail.app to cache your mail locally, so you can still search it. IMAP can be set up to work exactly like POP, with the added benefit that you CAN have the same saved emails and folders and stuff wherever you choose to check your email.

I have never heard of a case where an IMAP database was compromised, but I suppose it's possible... But, your local computer can be compromised as well (unlikely since it's a Mac, unless someone guesses your password).

Overall, I think IMAP is better, but if you don't have a problem with the way your POP is now, it doesn't matter.

Just saw the webmail notice

But, that only seems like someone was sniffing passwords, not hacking the mail database, so that could have happened with a POP server too.

[Edited on August 9, 2005 at 5:13 PM. Reason : 2]

8/9/2005 5:09:22 PM

i like POP - I have a copy of all incoming mail forwarded to a GMail account for archival on-line, in the case that I need it. Otherwise, it's all POPed into Outlook on my desktop/laptop. I keep the two synced with a simple batch script that copies over the PST file every time it's run. if i wanted to keep everything in IMAP, i would have over 3 GB as well - it's not a feasible solution for large quantities of e-mail for me.

8/9/2005 11:42:58 PM

Switch to IMAP.

IMAP doesn't mean that you have to store all your mail on the mail server. In fact, you aren't going to be able to, because you have a limit of 300MB available to split between your AFS storage (aka the "K:\" drive), Novell Storage (aka the "M:\" drive) and IMAP.

You can merrily still use local folders on your Macintosh all day long. (one "sort-of" nice thing about Mail.app is that it caches all the mail on the IMAP server locally in order to search it via spotlight too). What IMAP will let you do, among other things, is keep 50-200MB on the IMAP server, available anywhere and everywhere, from multiple mail clients, and including web-based clients like webmail - but you can still move/copy all of that to your local computer.

The webmail issue wasn't an issue of someone hacking into the mail servers. Webmail (nee, SquirrelMail) is just a client, like Mail.app or Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever (granted, it's a client that sits on a web server that's accessible by hundreds of people at once) and someone took advantage of a vulnerability in another piece of software running on that system. (e.g. much like a situation where, if you running windows, somebody would exploit Internet Explorer to install other software on your windows system which might impact your use of Outlook/Thunderbird/email client of choice)

I seriously doubt that the IMAP servers themselves are going to get hacked (unless there's a vulnerability discovered in the IMAP and/or SSH protocols).

IMAP, as implemented here at NCSU, is more secure than POP as implemented here at NCSU because if you set your client up correctly, or in the case of webmail, the entire communication stream is encrypted with SSL. Right now, when you use POP to get your mail, not only does your username and password get transferred to the POP server in clear text (unless you are using Kerberized POP, which I doubt) - but every single email message you download is also in the clear. If your local computer is a laptop on a wireless network, and some dimwit is sniffing the traffic, well, they just had the ability to read every one of your emails. If you configured IMAP correctly, you don't have that particular threat.

Besides the "read it everywhere" nature of IMAP (which you can sort of do with POP, but it's a hack to do it with POP, and at some point, I pretty much guarantee to you that you'll lose an email) - there's another benefit to IMAP - "sieve"-based server side filtering. You can set up server-side filters via the WebMail interface that can filter emails based on the spam flag or virus detected flags. Those process mail on the servers themselves, so you don't deal with having to setup filters in every single email client that you use. Sieve can also be used for vacation messaging, and other features.

See:

http://help.ncsu.edu/cgi-bin/get-soln.pl?id=3099
http://help.ncsu.edu/cgi-bin/get-soln.pl?id=3100
http://help.ncsu.edu/cgi-bin/get-soln.pl?id=3101

For more details on the sieve setup.

8/10/2005 9:06:35 AM

I switched to IMAP from POP this past May for the second time. I orginally switched back in 2000, but moved back after it gave me too much trouble. It seems both the clients and servers are much better than they were a few years ago.

I second OldManRamble's comments about the benefits of sieve server-based filtering. This server based filtering is especially important in my mind as it seems client based filters for imap occasionally miss messages.

Another interesting feature is what is known as "IMAP IDLE". When contected to a server such as NCSU's that supports it, the mail client is essentially immediately notified of new mail. This provides a sort of corporate-mail feel with notification of messages constantly instead of on a periodic basis. Unfortunately, not all mail clients support this well (or at all), including Mail.app. On Mac, Entourage and Thunderbird both support it.

[Edited on August 10, 2005 at 3:15 PM. Reason : ]

8/10/2005 3:15:40 PM

if you check POP every 5 minutes, that's more than often enough, i think...

8/10/2005 3:17:15 PM