IMAP, POP, Gmail and the future of email
Giles Turnbull has pulled out all the stops 
in a fine post on MacDevCenter. He discusses the the ins and outs of POP and IMAP, the rise and rise of Gmail, text messaging and the future of email in a three page whopper post.
Basically a stock-take of where email stands at the moment, along the way he takes in the free re-release of Mulberry, Google Apps for your domain and more.
For example, did you know that POP usage is gradually declining but IMAP is not taking off the way it should? I didn’t:
All email nuts should read what Giles has to say. A fine piece.
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Tags: Apple Mail, Email in general, GMAIL, Google, imap, mail.app, mulberry, POP, text messaging
August 31st, 2006 at 11:21 pm
That’s an illuminating graph, but we should be careful to not read too much into it. It’s a Google Trends graph, so it describes a pattern in search engine requests. We could interpret this in many ways that don’t necessarily reflect on the popularity.
How many users actually search on either pop3 or imap4? I would assume it’s mostly done by developers or IT people looking to support the protocols in software or through their network infrastructure.
So one interpretation of the graph is that POP is simply more confounding, and requires more google searching to understand :) Just one of many possible speculations.
August 31st, 2006 at 11:35 pm
Good point! And I like your alternative interpretation very much :)
September 1st, 2006 at 12:17 am
You also have to consider where these protocols are used. ISP’s don’t want their disk space taken up by your gigabytes of email that you don’t delete for whatever reason. Personal email from ISP’s will stay pop3 as long as email takes up disk space and there is no better method of getting your email from your ISP to your computer.
In the corporate world the situation is different. The ‘Company” owns all the messages you send and receive and want to back everything up “easily” – which means from a single location – the server. However when you are talking thousands of messages, the imap4 protocol doesn’t really hold up very well against impatient sales people on dialup connections. So there are probably many mail administrators out there looking at alternatives – be it webmail or something completely different. (If you know something let me know so I can appease those impatient sales people I have to deal with – they all hate webmail)