Re: [Evolution] Couple of questions - profile and bash

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> Okay, Patrick,

I hope you'll pardon me jumping in to answer the question ...

>  that raises a question. I stick to POP and always have,
> and my bride and I each have both iPhones and iPads which we regularly
> use to fetch our mail traffic when traveling, plus I have a laptop
> running Fedora which I sometimes haul along on trips so that I'll have a
> better keyboard. None of these devices have any difficulty retrieving
> mail from the POP server at the ISP that hosts our mail. Except that
> every so often, following one of the frequent iOS updates to the Pad,
> my POP-server password has disappeared and has to be reloaded :-)
>
> I should maybe add that my wife's address and mine are on the same domain,
> fdi.us, since I own that one.
>
> So what compelling reason would there be for us to change to IMAP?
> We danged sure don't do any "sharing" with anyone else,and being 
> retired, foresee no chance that we ever would. So - IMAP - ??? Why?
First off, the bottom line is that if POP works for you, then that's
fine.

The issue though is that POP was designed as a mail retrieval protocol:
you connect to the server, get the mail, disconnect. By default the
mail is removed from the server once it has been retrieved. In some
ways it's modelled on the way that paper mail operates if you have a
post office box: the mail is moved around the country by the postal
service until it lands in your PO Box, you then go to the post office
and retrieve your mail. That's basically why POP = Post Office
Protocol.

This was all fine in the 1980's when you only ever had a single
computer that you used - the mail could be downloaded to your computer
and manipulated from there.

When people started having two computers, many implementations added
the ability to leave the messages on the server rather than just moving
the messages to the local computer so that multiple machines could get
hold of the mail.

As POP is a purely retrieval protocol, it doesn't have any concept of
more fancy things such as folders - it has one mail store, the INBOX.

So, all well and good if you are just using one machine.  Evolution is
perfectly capable of retrieving mail by POP and putting it in the "On
My Computer" INBOX. You might even have filters on that incoming mail
to put it in other folders.

But what happens if you want to use a different device. Sure, you can
leave the mail on the server and the second device will retrieve it as
well. But if you had deleted some mail, or moved something to a
different folder, or replied to an email, this second device will know
nothing about that, so you'll have to delete the mail again, or move it
to a folder again, and try and remember if you had replied to it (and
what you had said in that reply).

With IMAP this is all built in. The mail stays on the server, so any
changes you make to the mail folders is picked up by all the devices:
you delete an email and it won't be seen on the other devices; move it
to another folder in the IMAP structure (yes, IMAP knows about folders)
and it will be in that folder on all the other machines; and the
replied-to flag is visible on all the IMAP clients along with the Sent
folder so you can see that a mail has been answered and you have access
to the contents of the message you've sent.

It's nothing to do with sharing mail between users, it's to do with you
having access to a consistent view of your own email between devices. I
currently have 4 Linux boxes running Evolution, 2 Windows machines
using Outlook and/or TB, an iPhone and an iPad all using IMAP to access
 at least three different mail accounts - many of them at the same time
- and they all see the same emails in the same folder structure.

The only downside of IMAP is that you need a reliable network
connection in order to retrieve and work on your mail. There are
workarounds: devices and servers are usually very good at resolving
conflicts and inconsistencies; there's also programs such as Offline
IMAP that synchronises local changes to an IMAP server if your net
connection is dodgy.  TBH these days WiFi and 4G are so common that
it's a surprise when I can't get on a network somewhere!

I'm sorry, this mail seems to have turned quite long - but your usage
pattern of multiple devices accessing the same mail source is just
about ideal for IMAP!

P.