TidBITS Networking: Achieving Email Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail - 0 views
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Well, that's what I intended to do, anyway. The more I wrote, the more I realized how many aspects of the IMAP/Gmail/Mail universe are unclear or confusing, as evidenced by the many email messages I've received on those subjects, and as feedback to my books ("Take Control of Apple Mail in Leopard" and "Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail") and my Macworld articles on the topic. So, what I thought would be a straightforward article has turned into a manifesto. (That means it's quite long, and somewhat opinionated - fair warning!) And, I admit it: I've written it for a largely selfish reason, which is to save myself from having to explain this information repeatedly in email messages! But I do hope you'll find it interesting and helpful if you've ever struggled with the combination of IMAP, Gmail, and Mail.
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POP and IMAP are both methods of retrieving messages from a mail server. (In fact, many mail servers support both protocols, enabling you to access the same messages in either way.) The most common way to explain the difference between POP and IMAP is this: With POP, you download all your messages to your computer, whereas with IMAP, all your messages remain on the server. That's more or less true, but it overlooks several important points.
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In the first place, IMAP servers, unlike POP servers, can keep track of flags for each message, indicating things like which messages have been read, forwarded, or replied to. With POP, your local email client has to track this information. That means if you download a bunch of messages on computer A using POP but leave them on the server, and then switch to computer B, you can still download the messages again, but they'll all appear to be unread - computer B won't know which messages you've seen, filed, or otherwise dealt with, because that information isn't kept on the POP server.
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