IMAP E-mail: Experiences & Freeware Recs

[jason]

I'm looking into a new ISP that supports only IMAP, not POP email. From
what I've read, this doesn't sound too appealing. It's mainly geared to
reading/storing e-mails online, not great when you have a slow dial-up
connection. I'd rather have mail automatically downloaded to my disk via
Pimmy or some other client.

That said, are there any good freeware IMAP clients around? And what are
your good and bad experiences with IMAP vs POP on a slow dial-up
connection.

Thanks!

 

[Mel]

I'm looking into a new ISP that supports only IMAP, not POP email. From
what I've read, this doesn't sound too appealing. It's mainly geared to
reading/storing e-mails online, not great when you have a slow dial-up
connection. I'd rather have mail automatically downloaded to my disk via
Pimmy or some other client.

That said, are there any good freeware IMAP clients around? And what are
your good and bad experiences with IMAP vs POP on a slow dial-up
connection.

Thanks!

I use dial-up and I prefer IMAP (although I prefer not to use
the email service provided by my ISP as it makes it less
convenient to change ISPs).

With IMAP a copy of you emails is kept on the server
so you can access them from other computers (eg work and home),
your email client can synchronise your local folders with those
of the server so you can read your emails offline.

You can create new folders on the your ISP's mail server
and usually also set up filtering rules on it (rules are usually
configured via a webmail interface).

Handy for separating or deleting suspect spam and messages
with large attachments, so you can save bandwidth by just
downloading the message headers for emails you might
not want to read.

Your IMAP client will give you the option of automatically
downloading message bodies or just downloading headers
for each folder you create.


I currently use OE as my client, but can't recommend it
for IMAP as it doesn't provide local filtering on IMAP
accounts.

 

[Werdhi]

Jason, check out Mozilla Thunderbird. It's free, open-source software
that will do IMAP and POP. You can have multiple accounts, access many
webmail accounts as well with an extension to the core program. Also
handles RSS feeds and newsgroup accounts. I dropped Eudora for
Thunderbird and have been very happy with it. It has suburb junkmail
filtering as well. It will synchronize online and offline folders
nicely. Should do everything you want.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

 

[ms]

I'm looking into a new ISP that supports only IMAP, not POP email. From
what I've read, this doesn't sound too appealing. It's mainly geared to
reading/storing e-mails online, not great when you have a slow dial-up
connection. I'd rather have mail automatically downloaded to my disk via
Pimmy or some other client.

That said, are there any good freeware IMAP clients around? And what are
your good and bad experiences with IMAP vs POP on a slow dial-up
connection.

Thanks!

Jason, I also have a slow DUN connection. Used to have POP service for my
email but for the past year, I've been happy with the free Fastmail IMAP
webmail server. I access it through Firefox for email. I save off the
server any messages of value. I have a different free webmail server for
casual email, it gets lots of spam, but with webmail, I just delete it on
the server.

I use my Copper POP ISP with Thunderbird only for windows newsletters, like
Langa, Lockergnome, etc., never for normal email. That channel has recently
started to get spam, so I've never automatically downloaded email on a POP
server. I use Popcorn to review it, delete spam on the server, then let
Tbird download the good stuff to my hard drive.

Mike Sa

 

[Chrissy Cruiser]

That said, are there any good freeware IMAP clients around?

Thunderbird. Eudora does IMAP but I would choose TBird since there are
known problems with Eudora.

 

[jason]

Thunderbird. Eudora does IMAP but I would choose TBird since there are
known problems with Eudora.

A number of you mentioned Thunderbird, so I'll start there. Thanks for the
info and suggestions.

 

[Arnold DeRoy]

That said, are there any good freeware IMAP clients around? And what are
your good and bad experiences with IMAP vs POP on a slow dial-up
connection.

Pegasus Mail ( http://www.pmail.com ) is also an excellent IMAP
client. Freeware.