On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 07:38:57AM -0400, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 14, 2017 03:56:38 AM tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 03:32:33PM -0400, Steve Kleene wrote: > My employer is forcing me to shut down my long-time Linux mail server. I > have no choice in the matter. > > My employer uses Microsoft Exchange/Outlook for mail. They have an > Outlook Web App (OWA) that I can access from Firefox, but as far as I > can tell you cannot save a file to the local disk with OWA. That makes > OWA pretty useless. The documentation, if it can be believed, says that > I can access Outlook with POP3 and IMAP4 programs including Thunderbird. As others have said, IMAP is the best path (if the Exchannge server is set up for it).I'm sort of moving OT, but want to ask: presumably you think IMAP is preferable to POP3--what makes you say that (in general)?
Not the OP here, but...IMAP4 and POP3 basically treat your mail server as different things. IMAP is, essentially, a protocol for accessing your mailbox, while POP3 is a protocol for picking up your mail from another mailbox.
With IMAP, the expectation is that your MUA is just a viewer of email. The mail is stored elsewhere and you want to read/reply/manage it without worrying about storing it. So IMAP allows you to download just the headers of messages - meaning that you can, for example, read the small messages and leave the big ones for later. There are even advanced features in IMAP such as the ability to save a message in an Outbox folder and ask the IMAP server to send the message out (in case your MUA doesn't have access to an SMTP server).
With POP, the expectation is that the remote mail server is merely looking after your mail temporarily. So the default for POP is to download all the messages and remove them from the remote server. POP is great when your remote mail server is managed by your ISP, and they only give you a limited quota. You wouldn't want to be storing months of messages there, so you pull them all to your local machine and read them there.
So, they are different protocols for different purposes. That's not to say that you can't work the other way around (your IMAP client could be configured to delete all messages once fetched, your POP client could be configured to leave messages on the server).
It's been a long time since i chose to use pop3 instead of imap--in fact, iirc, imap became an option later, and my decision was more whether to stick with pop3 or switch to imap. I prefer pop3 because it (in most cases, unless set otherwise or dealing with gmail) deletes the email from the email server, which is what I prefer. I presume imap gives you an option to delete mail from the server?
When you delete a message in your MUA, IMAP will generally mark the message as deleted, rather than deleting it there and then. When you close the mailbox (either by closing your MUA or by navigating away from the mailbox, depending on the client) an "EXPUNGE" command is sent, which deletes all messages marked for deletion.
I recognize that leaving email on the server can make it easier to access your email from multiple devices, but (1) I rarely have that need (maybe not in the last 10 years), and (2), when I do, I can set pop3 to leave email on the server (but, iirc, I typically set my "main" email device to delete it from the server--iirc, if I didn't, I'd keep getting the same emails sent to me over and over--but maybe I'm not remembering that correctly.
-- For more information, please reread.
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