For several years now I’ve used GMail along with Thunderbird (if you are a Thunderbird user and haven’t tried Thunderbird 3 and its tabbed email, then give it a spin.  Its pretty sweet) as an email client and POP3 to access, read, and send email.  Its been a nice solution for me and I’ve had little to no trouble.  With the recent acquisition of an iPhone however, I had been itching to switch everything over from POP3 to IMAP.  Afterall, accessing your email with POP3 on multiple computers/devices leaves you open to not only losing emails, but its a tremendous waste of time to have to sort thru emails on your desktop, then sort thru the same ones on your laptop, iPhone or whatever. I won’t go into specifics here on how POP3 and IMAP work, for more on that go here and here.  In an nutshell though if you are using POP3 and read an email in your email client on your desktop you are downloading that message to your machine.  Lets say you have 10 new messages and you read thru them all then file or delete them accordingly.  Likely you also have your settings so that it leaves a copy of the message on the server instead of deleting it.  You then go out for lunch,  while sitting in traffic or waiting for your order, you whip out your iPhone and check your email.  It quickly fills up saying you have 10 new messages.  Upon checking them you see they are the same 10 messages you just read.  Now you have to file appropriately or delete those on your iPhone.

See The POP protocol requires the currently connected client to be the only client connected to the mailbox. In contrast, the IMAP protocol specifically allows simultaneous access by multiple clients and provides mechanisms for clients to detect changes made to the mailbox by other, concurrently connected, clients.   Using IMAP  you would still be able to see the 10 messages on your iPhone  that you just read before leaving for lunch (assuming you didn’t delete them) but they would be not only be marked as read, but also filed appropriately in whatever folder structure you happen to create for your emails.  Nice right?

So to sum all this up,  here are the general steps I took to convert my email from POP3 to IMAP.  Note that I am using GMail with Thunderbird 3 as my client and an iPhone.  Settings, procedures for different email servers/clients may vary.  The process took a good chunk of time on a rainy Sunday afternoon, but most of that was me doing some “spring cleaning” on my email inbox and folders.

1. Logged into my gmail account(s) thru the web interface and archived any remaining mail in my inbox.  Its a good idea to do this, especially if you have been using GMail for a while and haven’t deleted a majority of emails, otherwise when you create your IMAP account on your client it’ll have to spend a bit of time syncing all those emails.
2. In Thunderbird, I then created a new IMAP account using the connection settings for IMAP provided by GMail
3. In Thunderbird and under the new IMAP account, I replicated my folder structure that I had been using with the POP3 account.
4. Copy or move your emails from the POP3 account to the appropriate folders in your new IMAP account.  This is where the “spring cleaning” before hand saved me some time on this step.
5. Delete your POP3 account from Thunderbird.

Now if you view your GMail account thru the web interface you will see all the folders that you just created in Thunderbird, except they aren’t really “folders” in the GMail interface, but labels.  You’ll need to also set up IMAP on your iPhone or other mobile device as well as any other computers that you regularly access email on with an email client.  The folder structure you created initially will also appear automatically on these devices as well.

This all can seem like an ominous task and one that I avoided it for a while, but overall, it was very easy and so far in the 4 days that I’ve been on IMAP, well well worth the time.

Tags: Access Email across multiple clients, Emails, GMail, IMAP, POP, Thunderbird

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 9:17 pm and is filed under tutorials, web design, web development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.