Saturday, April 18, 2009

Why I switched from Outlook to Thunderbird, and Why IMAP is Awesome.


First off, I would like to point out that i use Gmail for my main email client. I have been using Gmail for 3 years now. I have tried Yahoo, AOL, and a couple others, but nothing tops the features of Gmail.

Secondly, I have also been using outlook for a couple years now. I was downloading via POP3 from Gmail, and i was really starting to hate it. The main problem was, I could only use outlook on my desktop. On my laptop and school computers, I would have to use Gmail online. One day, I was waiting for an important email from a friend. I was on my laptop, and he said he'd sent it to me. What I didn't realize was my desktop was on and already got the email and downloaded it to Outlook.

I had to search through my Gmail folders for a while to find the message and reply to it. When I got home and got to my desktop, I looked in outlook and the email was marked as unread. This was a problem in my mind, because it was going to get confusing as to what emails i have replied to and witch i have not.

Then my friend pointed out an easy solution: IMAP. I was using POP3, but it was not working too well. I did not know much about how downloading emails worked, so I did some researching. First off, IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol And POP3 stands for Post Office Protocol version 3. These are both part of the Internet Protocol Suite, but they seem to be the most popular for downloading emails.

Basically, POP3 downloads emails to your computer, and IMAP gives your computer access to your inbox. (In Gmail).

For POP3, Gmail gives you some options for after you download the email to your computer. It can archive it (put it in the "all mail" folder), delete it, or keep it in your inbox. This may be nice for some people with one computer, but it got confusing using it on multiple computers for me.

On the other hand, IMAP gives you the option for your inbox to be the same, and always updated no matter what computer you are on. The downside is, though, if your not connected to the Internet you will have to use your email program's "offline" mode, and if it doesn't have an offline mode you can't view your email. But that's not a problem if you have something like Thunderbird.

Now, I have Thunderbird on all my computers, and my inbox stays updated. The other problem was getting my Gmail calender updated on all my computers with Thunderbird, but this did the trick.

Here are some links you might find useful if you want to download anything or get some more information.

Download Thunderbird- http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/
Info on Syncing Gmail with Thunderbird - http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77662
Info on POP3 and IMAP - http://www.unitedhosting.net/support/faq/5.1.php

How-to on This Coming Soon!


Have any Questions or comments? Leave a comment and I'll be glad to respond to them!
-Drummeralec

3 comments:

Budgetperson said...

Wow Nice Job! Glad you have everything under control. How-To would be nice?

drummeralec said...

I was thinking about that, but this post was really long. I'll do it in the next post. :)

Unknown said...

IMAP PWNS POP3