Now you have a choice of POP3 or IMAP.  You can also have any mixture.  Some email boxes on your web site can remain as POP3, and others can be IMAP.  Thus, the remaining part of this page is to explain the advantages of IMAP.  Most email programs support IMAP, such as Eudora, Netscape Communicator 4.5, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, and Pine.

IMAP was designed to support online operation, so...

IMAP lets you keep both your incoming mail and all your other mailboxes and folders on the central email server (ours), where the IMAP server will maintain them for you. Because the central machine is always running and available on the Internet, you'll always be able to access your email, whether you're at home, at the office, or anywhere on the Internet.

IMAP treats all mailboxes that you have on the central server as if they were local to your computer. This means you can list, create, delete, and rename mailboxes by using your IMAP email client (software) on your desktop machine, including mailboxes you originally created on the server.  And yes, of course, you can keep some of your mailboxes on your personal computer, although these local mailboxes will not be managed by IMAP. You can even move messages to and from the server machine.

IMAP allows you to use different email programs from different locations. Example, use Eudora home, Outlook at the office, Netscape at a friend's house, or telnet to tigger when you're traveling.

IMAP's support of online processing (allowing you to leave your email on the central server) is a security plus. Your account on the email service machine is password protected; as long as you give other people your password (and don't have your email client remember it!), no one else will be able to read your mail. You can work on personal computer -- even a shared one -- and still keep your privacy.

IMAP works well over slow Internet connections. Information is sent in small pieces and only as needed. For example, you can delete spam messages without downloading them (IMAP only needs the message headers to build mailbox indexes), and you can read messages without downloading any attachments they might have.

IMAP supports "concurrent updates and access to shared mailboxes". Do you share responsibility for a secondary email from a Web page with a number of people?  Instead of sending a copy to everyone and perhaps duplicating efforts, send them to one person, who saves them in a special mailbox on the server.  IMAP allows everyone who needs the mailbox to access it at the same time.

IMAP offers advantages over POP in three areas: increased security, richer functionality in manipulating your maildrop(s) and remote mailboxes besides your maildrop, and better online performance, especially when dealing with large MIME messages.

When you setup an IMAP mailbox (in your web mail manager control panel), you are simply indicating that you want email for that mailbox to remain on our servers.  When the email program on your computer sends/receives mail to/from us, it synchronizes your folders with ours.  The result is that you can have identical copies of your email folders on several computers.

When email comes to your email box, it is delivered to our central IMAP server. Your personal computer email program is just a mail client that sends and receives email, but no longer manages it locally.  Only a "copy" of your emails are kept locally.

SO, HOW DO YOU SET UP AN IMAP EMAIL BOX INSTEAD OF THE POP3 EMAIL THAT YOU HAVE NOW?
It's easy.  Just access your web control panel and create a new email box.  You will be given a choice of deciding if that email box will be treated as a POP3 or IMAP box.

If you want to change an existing POP3 email box to IMAP, then there is an extra process involved.  Download all of your existing email first, then delete your email box from the web control panel and recreate it.  Sorry, but you can't simply change an existing email box from PoP3 to IMAP.  This is because there are separate server requirements on our side.

The only change you need to make on your local computer email program is to identify the email address as being an IMAP type.  This selection is in the account settings of your email program.