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New iPhone with Weird Guy and Gundam Photo Outside the Factory | iPhone News Updated - 0 views

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    People keep finding photos in their new iPhones, and these keep getting weirder and weirder. This time, Giz reader Bryan Offenhauer found this funny shot of an anonymous guy next to a human-sized Gundam
Bakari Chavanu

TidBITS Networking: Achieving Email Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail - 0 views

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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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  • Second, speaking of filing, another key difference between POP and IMAP is that POP has just one mailbox - your inbox - on the server, whereas an IMAP server can have any number of mailboxes. So, if you check your email on computer A and move a certain message to your Read mailbox, and then check your email on computer B, that message will appear in the Read mailbox there as well.
  • If you use IMAP, you absolutely can have local copies of all your email messages, in their entirety, on your computer, and you can read, search, file, and do anything else you want to do with those messages even if you have no Internet connection at all - just as you can when you use POP.
  • And, as a bonus, you can use IMAP as a sort of rudimentary email backup. Even if your disk crashes or your computer is stolen, you'll still have a copy of all your messages on the server.
  • IMAP does have a couple of downsides, which may or may not be significant to you. First, most IMAP servers impose a storage quota on each user. If that quota is fairly low (say, 1 GB), you could run out of space for all your messages, forcing you to move some off the server to a mailbox that's stored only on your computer.
  • Apple Mail, which is a much better IMAP client than some, nevertheless has a handful of quirks in its handling of IMAP that can drive one to distraction. If you combine Mail's IMAP oddities with those of a less-than-standard IMAP server - Web Crossing, I'm looking at you - you could easily have unpleasant experiences that may lead you to the erroneous conclusion that IMAP itself is buggy or poorly designed. (Later on, I'll get into the even weirder ways that Gmail deals with IMAP.)
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