The Mac Lawyer Using Macs in Law Firms | Attorney Ben Stevens

IMAP vs. POP :: What You Need to Know

By J. Benjamin Stevens on Posted in Software

Do you know whether your e-mail client uses POP (Post Office Protocol) or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)?  You should, because IMAP is vastly superior to POP, and you should consider the following reasons that you should switch today:

  1. Avoid webmail outages :: Users who connected to their web-based email accounts (such as Gmail) using IMAP can continue to retrieve their mail as usual even if the web-based email platform goes down.
  2. Switch clients or platforms painlessly :: You can move effortless from one program to another without having to export / import messages and risk losing messages or the metadata attached to them.
  3. Read all your mail on multiple devices :: For people who must use a variety of devices or operating systems, IMAP lets you see exactly the same data – including saved, filed, and sent messages – on every device.
  4. Keep an extra copy of your messages :: The fact that IMAP gives you both local and server-based copies of each message can help you avoid data loss.

Source:  "Four reasons to switch to IMAP" by Joe Kissell, published at Macworld.com.

  • Reg-o-rama

    I feel like a total idiot, but this post made me realize that I can use Gmail in IMAP and not just POP (which is the default, for some reason, when you tell Apple Mail to automatically set up the account). Thank you thank you thank you! The fact that me reading something on my iPhone didn’t mark it as read in Apple Mail had been driving me crazy.

  • http://www.fastmail.fm Jack Miller

    IMAP is critical for many reasons. The first is that it is stored on a server. Hopefully, your email partner has a good backup strategy. The second is of-course syncing with all our devices (work computer, home computer, Blackberry, iPhone, etc).
    Another overlooked feature for many customers is some form of “compliance journaling” or archive. This is different that another place to store old email. It is a complete log of all email sent/received by anyone inside of the firm. IMAP is great, but it won’t save you if you accidentally delete some critical client email (and didn’t realize for 6 months).
    IMAP + Good Email Provider + Good Backup and Support from Email Vendor + Compliance Journaling = Good Email Solution for Attorneys
    Simply having IMAP may not be enough.

  • Dan VASAX

    IMAP has many advantages. So far, so good. But did anyone think about email security in terms of confidentiality as emails are stored centrally on the servers of the Email Provider (e.g gmail.com belonging to GOOGLE – “The Big Brother Is Watching You” Company). What about discrete email scanning by “secret” authorities without our knowledge ? How may our clients trust in our job if the messages are “watchable” by agencies and others ? – It’s mandatory to get guarantees from the Email Provider that all the content is securely encrypted on the servers and only the mailbox owner (we or our client) has the appropriate key to decipher the message content. That seems to be a vital question for lawyers and their client, isn’t it ?