[MW Forums]

Has this ever happened to you? You’re on the road or working at home and you need an important e-mail message. The problem is that you downloaded it at the office, and there it sits, inaccessible, on your desktop Mac. There is a solution: IMAP. more

[NaOH]

As was pointed out in the article, most IMAP clients can cache emails.
The problem I have with this, is that it's an all or nothing approach. OK, you can choose to cache headers only, or to cache bodytext but not attachments, but these choices apply to ALL the emails. I had something a bit more 'granular' in mind.
I would like to see the option to have a cached copy of an email 'expire' from the cache. That would allow emails to be cached in their entirety, and after a given time, the local copy of an email would be erased from the email client. Ideally, that would ensure a user had access to all the most recent emails. It would also reduce the amount of space the cache uses on the local drive.
Of course, there would always be emails that a user wouldn't want to expire. So, to save the user from having to remember to open 297 emails every three months because he wants to keep them live, there would be a flag that could be set to prevent emails from expiring. (The flag could apply to folders as well as individual emails.)
I'm pretty sure none of this is unduly difficult to implement. It would also make IMAP that little bit more useful. (For me, anyway.)
I just thought I'd put this idea out there, so that maybe someone could use it.

[d00d]

Does your email really take up that much space?

[NaOH]

I just thought I'd add a little note, about Mulberry.
Mulberry was a dedicated IMAP client, available for the Mac, Windows and Linux.
It was arguably the email client that had the most complete support for the IMAP protocol.
It also let users have full control over attachments, allowing mixed format emails to be authored. (I have yet to see another email client that would let me make an email that contains text, HTML, rtf, quoted-printable, and rich-text (different from rtf) in one and the same email.
Mulberry's downfall was that it was just too damn powerful for the average user, and the interface showed it.
Too many options for your average Mac or Windows user.
They did try to implement a 'simple' interface as well as Admin setup tools, but that still didn't help.
Mulberry was cancelled last year.
If the developers had seen fit to release the source code, I am sure it would have been picked up by the Open Source community, as it had a fair following on Linux.
Unfortunately, they buried it.
Another victim of Intellectual Property.

[NaOH]

If you keep the attachments, yes.
It only takes 20 emails with 50MB attachments to use a gig of space.
(If you never receive 50MB attachments that you need to keep in their original format, you'll never need to worry about this.)

[d00d]

Ah, I see. I guess I've just never used email heavily for file transfer (especially considering many email services have a per email size cap, usually on the order of 10 to 20 MB).
In that case, it definitely makes sense. Then again, that sounds more like more like a task best served by something like NFS.

[NaOH]

I agree, email was never designed to be a heavy-duty file transfer medium.
Unfortunately, a lot of office workers, and creatives do just that.
I've spent years trying to educate users in using file tranfer technologies that are more immediate, and put less strain on servers. Without it making any difference. People still want to send 50-80MB PowerPoint presentations and 'funny' video clips to all their friends. (Both inside and outside the office.)
I proposed capping the size of attachments, but was overruled. The reason given was that they 'need' to be able to receive these files from clients and suppliers, via email.
So, I just try to make the best of a difficult situation.
In conclusion, I believe that good email habits are a rarity.
(Also, you wouldn't believe how many people use their email as a searchable file store.)

[markhunte]

IMAP is good for keeping track of the flow of email, what you send and what you receive and allowing you to get access to both on the road.
But Most POP mail has some access to Web Mail.
I use .mac (IMAP)
and POP accounts.
My Mail Client Mail.app is set to never delete from server.
If I am on the road and do not have the mail I need I can log on to any one of my Pop mail's Web Mail.
Most have at least 2.gb of storage ready and waiting for me to fill up...
a Folder Action applescript like this one found here http://bbs.applescri...ic.php?id=17603
with a slight adjustment would take care of making sure sent mail went to a folder on the web mail server.

[Deejemon]

I never use anything but IMAP. Been using it for 10 years, and I don't plan to ever change. POP is just annoying to try and manage.
Unfortunately (well not really, since I don't particularly like it anyway), Eudora, which is our officially supported mail client, does IMAP notoriously horrendously badly, so I use Mac OS X Mail instead. Free, light-weight (doesn't command your entire screen like Entourage), and good integration with Mac OS X (obviously).

[whitedog]

IMAP is fine for the power user. But many people use web mail systems like AOL, totally oblivious to the fact there is any other way to do e-mail. For only a bit more complexity, I encourage people to use a POP client on their home computer and a web browser when they are away from home. This insures that all the mail they want to keep is stored locally and that they can get to their e-mail on the road if they need to - no synchronizing or other mail gymnastics necessary. This system is not appropriate for everyone; it can be too complex for those accustomed to having AOL hold their hands; and it doesn't offer all the features professional road warriors may require. But, in my opinion, it strikes a happy medium between abject simplicity and overwhelming complexity.

[richard5]

If your provider doesn't provide with an IMAP mailbox you can do it yourself, that is, if you have a permanent connection to the internet like ADSL. I've done it myself and I'm very happy with it. I even installed roundcube to have my own webmail client so I can access all my mail everywhere via the roundcube webmail or a locally installed IMAP client. If you want to read how I've done this check out my site
ISP in a box

[only120xs]

I was using IMAP and recently switched back to POP because it seemed too messy to have to have different folders for locally stored mail and mail on the server. And every couple of weeks I had to remember to remove messages from the server so my mailbox didn't get full.
Now I don't have to worry about messages in different folders and all I've lost is the read/replied/etc. flags when I access my mail from a browser. As a side note, I was never able to get my sent messages to sync correctly anyway, so I've lost nothing there. (They would always stay where I sent them from - if I sent from a browser, it stayed on the server, and if I sent from Mail, it stayed on my local drive. Drove me nuts.)

[only120xs]

In reply to:

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Keep Your Inbox Trim Whether you use rules (or filters) to redirect incoming messages into other mailboxes or sort your messages manually, try to limit the number of messages you store in your inbox; a good target is 40 or fewer. An overloaded inbox can slow down your e-mail client (especially if you use Mail) and make it harder to find messages.

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Funny, I hate having mutiple boxes... makes searching a pain. I have thousands of files right in my Mail inbox right now, and it doesn't seem to be slow at all.

[PhilandAriene]

The best way I've found to deal with email is to use Gmail POP. You can set Gmail to archive email messages after they've been downloaded. So if you are on the road and have already downloaded an important message somewhere else, you can browse to Gmail online and retrieve the archived version. This avoids many of the IMAP issues.