IMAP: It Makes E-Mail Easier

I think, therefore IMAP.

No, people, I did not misspell the iMac by Apple Computers. I am referring instead to a way of handling e-mail.

IMAP stands for Internet Mail Access Protocol. By using it, people can take advantage of useful features for dealing with e-mail that are not available when using the prevalent Unix e-mail client, Pine, or a POP mail client like Eudora.

To understand how IMAP works, it is useful to compare it to the other major e-mail access protocol known as POP, Post Office Protocol.

All users with an fas account have their e-mail inboxes and folders stored on the server in their home directories. For most, their e-mail saga starts with Pine. This is the program officially recommended by Harvard's computer services staff.

Although very powerful, for many people, Pine quickly becomes a nuisance.

With its ugly green color and keyboard-only interface, users are reminded of the dog days of DOS.

People who want the graphical interface they've grown accustomed to in applications such as word processors choose, as an alternative, to use a POP e-mail client such as Eudora.

With POP, e-mail is downloaded from the server onto your actual computer.

This proved useful in the days of expensive dial-up Internet connections because people could connect to a service provider for a few minutes, down-load hundreds of messages and read them without keeping their eyes on the clock.

But there are problems with POP, especially in a mobile environment such as a college campus. POP can work for those who primarily use one computer to do e-mail. But for people who need to access their messages everywhere all the time, POP is not good enough.

With all your mail downloaded to the local computer, your inbox shows up empty if you check it from anywhere else. In order to access downloaded messages, you can choose the option that allows you to leave your mail on the server.

However, the problem with this option is that it creates a burden on the servers. And because there is no synchronization between server messages and local messages, you can end up with heavy duplication.

Enter IMAP. This protocol was developed to make up for many of POP's shortcomings.

Rather than simply downloading all messages from the server, IMAP can download header information only, limited amounts of messages or the whole thing.

The catch is that it coordinates the local messages with those on the servers and mirrors the directory structure.

So, if you're in your room and add a folder or delete some messages, that new folder will be in your Pine folders list, or those deleted messages will be gone, when you next use Pine from the Science Center.

You get the perks of a graphical e-mail client such as drag-and-drop attachments, while at the same time, preserve the structure of your e-mail regardless of where you are.

So how do you take advantage of this smarter protocol?

The first step is to get an IMAP-compliant e-mail client. The closest one to most students on the Harvard network is Eudora, which can be installed from the FAS Network Installer.

Fans of Microsoft Outlook like myself will be happy to know that Outlook 98 is also a comparable IMAP option. Netscape's Messenger will work as well.

Just install one of these programs and set it up to use the IMAP protocol with imap.fas.harvard.edu as the incoming mail server.

With all I've said on the plus side of IMAP, it does have some limitations.

For one, not all e-mail clients are created equal, and all have some minor bugs. Only by experimentation will you know which one is right for you.

Second, although the mail synchronization is the key feature, two important items are not synchronized: the address book and the sent mail folder.

There is no nice way to import addresses from Pine into one of the graphical e-mail clients like Eudora and changing one will involve manually updating the other if you want total balance.

Also, many people need to be able to access sent mail from multiple locations. I can't name the number of times I've had to re-send old messages or prove I actually responded to someone's message.

But if you send a message from Outlook, for example, it gets put into the sent mail folder on your local machine, and this is not synchronized with the sent mail folder on the server that Pine uses.

But these issues existed with POP, and if you're looking for a way to standardize and simplify your e-mail existence, look no further than IMAP. Baratunde R. Thurston '99 is The Crimson's online-technology chair and a member of HASCS's advanced support team. This is his last column. Please e-mail comments, suggestions and questions to techtalk@thecrimson.harvard.edu.