My Biggest Complaint About People Who Don’t Use IMAP

The other day someone asked me to email them a file. I did. An hour later they asked me if I had sent them the file.

What happened to the email? They were checking their email from work and had accidentally left their home computer on. Their home computer was pulling emails automatically because the home email account was setup as a POP account instead of an IMAP account. The person was unable to retrieve the email and the file at work because their home computer grabbed the email first.

I had to resend the email with the file again. No big deal other than the fact that it is totally unnecessary and wastes a few minutes each time something like this happens.

It’s pretty simple, really, just use IMAP instead of POP and my complaint will be resolved.

If you check your email from multiple computers like your work computer and your home computer. Don’t setup your email accounts as POP email accounts. You probably don’t have any idea what that means but just don’t do it. In a nutshell, when your Outlook, Apple, Thunderbird or other email application asks you when you are setting up your account whether or not you want to set the account up as a POP or IMAP account, please choose IMAP.

POP accounts pull your email messages off the email server and store them on the computer on which you first read the email. This means if you check your email at home and you are using POP to get your messages, your message is pulled to your computer at home and you will not be able to retrieve the message when you check your email at work.

This can get really annoying if you happen to leave one of the computers on and it automatically checks your email every couple of minutes. The home computer can be pulling messages from your email account while you are at work when you really need to read them.

Solve the problem by using IMAP which leaves the email on the server until you delete the email in some way like deleting the email from your inbox.

If you setup your IMAP account instead of your POP account, your email will be available from multiple computers until you decide to delete it.