Big Wraps for IMAP (and tuffmail)
Monday, October 23rd, 2006
Not long ago Mail.app guru Joe Kissell was talking up 
the virtues of IMAP for email.
Now PC World has a post on the advantages of IMAP over POP as the protocol that should be handling your email.
It points out the gains of having email stored on a remote server, especially if you move around or need to access the same email at home and at work (or anywhere else). Storing your email remotely also allows you the freedom to use different email clients—Thunderbird on a PC at work, Mail.app on the Mac at home or whatever.
Needless to say it is also nice to have the security of remote storage. Whatever happens to my MacBook Pro or its harddrive, I know my mail is safe.
For example, deleting the settings for a POP account in Mail can delete all the messages stored in that account’s local folders. When they are gone, they are really gone. With IMAP, I know that can never happen. I just download them again into Mail.app’s local cache. That’s saved my bacon a few times.
Of course, you need to have the IMAP option in order to use it. Many ISPs still don’t offer it. I have been a long-time and very happy Fastmail user.
Geir at codehaus has just jumped from POP to IMAP. He gives tuffmail (another specialised email service provider) a glowing review.
A quick glance at the features tuffmail offers (cf. Fastmail’s features ), suggests that it is more flexible and more expensive than Fastmail.
You can build your own package with the mailboxes, storage and features that you need. It offers Roundcube as an interface for its webmail service. On the other hand, you don’t get the WebDAV disk that an enhanced Fastmail account offers.
No doubt there are other providers with IMAP offerings just as rich and useful. It’s the best USD 40 that I spend each year.
In return I get an utterly dependable, first-class IMAP service. If only all the things to which I am addicted were that cheap!
Tags: Apple Mail, fastmail, imap, mail.app, POP, specialist email providers, storage, thunderbird, tuffmail