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IMAP stands for "Internet Message Access Protocol", and is an improvement on
the more common POP mail download system.
When using IMAP, a copy of all messages in your mailbox are kept on our servers. When you view
your mailbox, you are actually only viewing an list of the emails on the server — the
individual emails are only downloaded as you view them.
Some benefits of IMAP over POP are:
- Speed — since you do not have to download all the emails before you can view them,
accessing a large mailbox through IMAP is much faster than POP.
- Roaming — You can safely access an IMAP mailbox from multiple locations. As the mail
is stored on the server, if you make a change to the mailbox from one location (such as
moving a message or marking it as read), this change will be visible from other locations
(including our web-mail facility).
- Server Folders — You can create sub-folders within an IMAP mailbox. This allows you to
organise your mail into separate folders. POP does not support multiple
folders and is not able to access emails in sub-folders.
- The filtering options in our administration panel can be used to filter
messages into IMAP folders automatically.
- Message upload — With IMAP, it's possible to upload a message directly to the server.
This means that you can move email messages from one mailbox to another. You can also have
your mail program save copies of your sent email messages in a folder on the server. As with
all IMAP folders, these will be accessible to you from anywhere.
for more details on IMAP, see RFC 1730 - Internet
Message Access Protocol
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