RLGaming.com

So I was wondering. When you have an IMAP account, your email synchs up. But hat is considered the reference to which everything synchs up to? The server that the emails actually reside on?

So if you say, have a Microsoft email account, and you are doing the email via the web, and then you add Outlook to your laptop and synch it, will your laptop get all the emails so it mirrors the server, or will the server empty out since the laptop Outlook is empty?

OK, how about if you have a POP3 account where you download all the mail from the server to your laptop. If you changed the type of email client from POP3 to IMAP, does the server on the web then populate with the email that is on your laptop? Or will it wipre the laptop since the server has nothing on it since you downloaded all the mail via POP3.

Now let's say for whatever reason you went from POP3 to IMAP but decided to go back to POP3. How would you get everything from the server to the laptop? Will changing to POP3 just make it say, ok, and download everything to the laptop and off the server?

Thanks.

v6,
boNes

for IMAP, everything is on and remains on the server. any client you connect should be able to see all the emails form multiple devices.

pop clients have the option to delete from the server when they download, or leave a copy on the server. pop is pretty old and was original method to get emails, download to a client. then people started having the need or desire for multiple clients, therefore leave a copy on the server option. it is still not ideal for multiple client. IMAP is the way to go.

the thing to watch for with IMAP is some servers limit the amount of space you have for your mailbox, so you have to keep it cleaned up. if you need to save the old emails, you need to archive them to some other storage space.

np, the client will NOT populate the email from your laptop back to the server, you have to manually put it back on the server. usually you would do this by copying the emails from the local folders/storage back to the server folders in the IMAP client.

if you used imap, but then switch back to pop, it will download the emails when you connect. just make sure you do not have the keep a copy on the server as an option in the client. also watch for emails that might already exist from switching client types, when the pop client connects again it will download and may re-download emails that have already been downloaded to your client storage.

i highly recommend sticking to one or the other. IMAP is generally the best method, then all of your emails are on the server and you have access to them from any laptop/workstation. usually email servers also have a web client you can use to look at those same emails.