Switching From Pop To IMAP Maybe - Help Please

By the end of the year, my pop account with my Internet service will be stopped and I must change email addresses. Have been using Pop3 for ages but thinking of using IMAP now but no familiarity with it all. I use The Bat! as my email client and would like to keep using it if possible. I have asked about this before but thought I would start a new thread to try to tie up all my loose ends now that I have to change email addresses. Could you help me with the following wuestions and thank you much.

1. Does anyone prefer Pop3 over IMAP and why?

2. What IMAP service is best - AOL or GMail or something else - free email service with good features and storage.

3. How do I set up IMAP with The Bat! say for Gmail?

4. Regarding my thousands of Pop3 messages in my old account, should I just leave them there as an archive rather than transferring to IMAP account? Is there any way they could be transferred if I wanted to - from Pop3 to IMAP account?

That is it for now but I may think of more questions. Thanks again for all.

Gary

 

1.- I prefer IMAP. It's faster, as it only downloads the messages you actually open. For the rest of the messages, it only downloads the subject. Also, it syncronized with your Inbox. Messages you open, will appear as read on your e-mail account. With POP they are still unread when you access webmail.

2.- Don't know with AOL. I use GMail with no problems at all.

3.- In Gmail, there is a tutorial somewhere to configure different e-mail clients. If yours is not on the list, there is a "generic" one.

 

At work we use IMAP with Outlook 2003 and I have lots of reliability problems... using POP3 is fine... you need to make sure you have an email client that works well with IMAP - I cannot comment on the Bat - and a reliable IMAP server.

I rate Gmail, works better than AOL IMHO and works great with Thunderbird (perfectly with a few minor tweaks), spam filtering is very good and a good web interface when im not using my laptop.

Some people dislike Gmail's policy over retaining deleted emails in their private search indexes and cookie issues.
Conversely Gmail are clear(er) than Yahoo, AOL AND Microsoft, who all do various kinds of tracking, but are less specific (eg Yahoo uses web beacons) and do have a better security track record.

You can setup Gmail to import emails from another POP3 account (if they are still on the server). Took me about a week to import 1gb of emails (it does them in batches to prevent flooding servers), copied the emails 100% reliable, but had to check the spam folder as a number of false positives were created.

If the emails are on your local machine, I know in thunderbird you can simply drag and drop between folders in different email account - with large amounts of email, it does appear like it hangs, but is busy working away and worked for me transferring about 100mb of emails.

 

Also, you if you need to, you can set imap folders to download ALL contents locally to be read off-line (and when you reconnect they will re-sync with the server).

 

1.I like IMAP.
2.Gmail, as it receives messages very fast(unlike some other email services that fail to receive the email at all), and as it really blocks the spam.
3.On using GMAIL with the bat I just found this, then this from gmail, but it is only for POP, so try also reading this

 

Thanks much and is anyone out there using The Bat! with IMAP successfully, with GMail preferrablya dn thanks.

Gary

 

transitioning to gmail using The Bat! as my client but every time I restart Windows, do not have any gmail account visible in The Bat and have to start new account process again before it picks up the imap folders. Have set the folders to synchronize full messages but still this problem when restarting Windows. Anyone know what is the cause and how to correct it?

Also, when I first check IMap account mail I get an unknown CA Certificate error and I do not know how to get rid of this. Any help appreciated.

Gary

 

Haven't used The Bat, so I can't help here, but I have a question for you:
Is there a reason to use The Bat, or are other clients an option? I recently migrated from Outlook to Thunderbird and it works perfectly.

 

Check out this site.
http://www.emaildiscussions.com/

A lot of very informed posters on all matters regarding email questions.

Post your questions there and you will probably get a lot of responses.

 

Have posted to suggested forum and also I might have to just try Thunderbird although The Bat! has most powerful templates and filters features I have ever used in an email client. But, most immportant is stability above all.

Gary

 

I use Opera M2 for IMAP with gmail and find it to be very fast and reliable.

 

Have you considered just using Gmail via your browser and giving up on an email client? It works pretty smooth and Gmail even allows building your own filters. Plus, if you use a couple other email addresses, Gmail can interact with them so you only need to log in at Gmail. I set up a friend's mobile phone with Gmail and it works surprisingly well. She no longer bothers with a separate email program...

 

Ham,

Thanks and I have considered it but still miss templates for preformatted repetative emails and also the filters are rudimentary in Gmail compared to The Bat!. But, may just have to get used to GMail and get away from email clients. I do like how you can organize and find email quickly in gMail.

Gary

 

I prefer POP over IMAP.

Biggest reason is I prefer to keep my e-mail stored locally. I delete all messages from the server after downloading. Thus no reason to sync between off-line and on-line stores. With how I do e-mail I see zero advantage to moving to IMAP.

In the rare event I need to do e-mail away from home, I carry a USB Drive. I simply copy my e-mail clients program and data folders over, make a few setup changes and I am ready to go. When I am back I copy the data back to my hard drive.

I have many filters, events and scripts to handle my incoming and outgoing messages ranging from moving to specific folders based on filter conditions to modify message subject lines if place in a specific folder.

To be fair I don't using IMAP much so have little experience with it. I have one account that allows Web and IMAP access only, so I use IMAP to "POP" my incoming messages. The other accounts that have IMAP capability I setup an IMAP account in my client but rarely use them. I do use Gmail's IMAP to check Gmail's Spam folder for valid messages and move them to the Inbox, but that is about it.

 

All working well now. I got rid of Unknown CA error by delting IntermCA.ABD and RootCA.ABD, two file from my data directory. Also, now, no problems with account being visible after Windows restart.

Regarding IMAP and local storage, I believe if you set folders in client to full Synchronize, then you have a local copy also. Someone may correct if I am wrong.

Gary