A cheap IMAP solution.. thankyou google :)

I fixed my pop3 woes by changing to IMAP!

Okay this is the first of a two part blog to share my experiences with my work email. I've put it for so long now and well i have no body to blame except myself for the troubles I've had. This blog will talk you through how i turned my run of the mill POP mail server into a more flexible IMAP server.

So whats bad about POP?

Before i tell you how, here is a little 'why bother' salt for you. Up until now i have only really been accessing my emails via my work laptop and work PC. Anyone who uses a POP3 mail server (the kind you get when you buy some web hosting for example) will know that if you want to keep your mails backed up on the server then you need to download each mail on each device. Each time it downloads it , it thinks its unread and you end up with an annoying (albeit mostly painless) step and waiting for a chunk of mails to download and then 'marking as read' for those you know about. 

So why not carry on if its painless?

Well apart from the obvious - there is a better way I'm sure, I recently i joined the technical gadgets groupie club by buying an iTouch, but then i also bought myself a 5800 because i liked all the cool features and it pretty much made my iTouch obsolete...doh. However it son became apparent that even on my Orange unlimited (but what they really mean is 500MB) internet allowance on my contract, downloading every mail was going to get  little silly.....

Solution = IMAP not POP

Enter my solution... finally... IMAP. Okay so my knowledge on IMAP was accidental, i was poking around my google mail account and read this page - "What is IMAP".

Well if you cannot by bothered reading it you can take my one line explanation : "IMAP connects all the time to the server (as opposed to once every few minute) and will send back which emails you have read to the server". So okay its more than that but to you here and myself that's all that matters right now. 

But my email client doesn't support IMAP?

Neither did mine so i decided on using googlemail. And so far its working a charm. So okay i will keep this brief but helpful i hope. Generally speaking the process will go like this :

The Basics...

1. Create a google mail account  and sign in ( I made a new one for this)
2. In settings go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP section. 
3. Turn off POP and Turn on IMAP (read the help links for more back ground reading)
4. In your email control panel (mine is cpanel via my websites admin area) turn on forwarding for your email account and send all your incoming mails to your new google account
5. Get someone to send you a test email. It should now be in your google inbox.

Set up Outlook 2007 to connect to you IMAP google connection according to this [pick your browser]. Once you have done this you will, by Google's setup be able to send emails via Googlemail. This will even show you the rather crappy "onbehalf of" for the receiver if you setup the Googlemail reply address in the google settings menu.

TIP : You now can sync to your google account. A good tip is to know that in Googlemail, labels are like your outlook folders. If you now create a folder in your IMAP email via outlook you will see a label created in google mail. 

TIP : Google uses VERY fast database queries to search mails so if your trying to find something in your emails and you have A LOT like me that you need to keep active its faster to use Google's search than to look via outlook.

From @googlemail.com... that's not very professional looking??!

I want to maintain a professional image so its important that i keep my outgoing mails via my work email address. This is the only step you can't find online (or i counldn't so I'm putting it there). You need to change your outgoing email server back to your work email and change the login to your  outgoing mail server to the correct one. Outlook will let you set different incoming and outgoing mail servers and logins.

1. In outlook 2007 go to the menu Tools and select Account Settings
   
2. Click on your IMAP account and select change
   
3. Make sure "Your email address" is set to your work email address
   
4. Set the outgoing mail server to your outgoing mail server on your POP account
   
5. Click on "More Settings" and click on "Outgoing Server" 
   
6. Select "Log on using" and enter your POP user name and password.

Now Press okay and return to the previous window. If you have done this correctly then testing your email account will succeed on both receiving via your google IMAP and sending via your original email account. Remembering that anyone is still sending to your old email its just bouncing via google to you.

Summary..

Now i can connect to IMAP via my phone, it will only get NEW emails i haven't read if i wish and if i want i can get more but they won't be unread.. happy days.  I can send emails as before and hey will appear no different to my clients. As a bonus, i have a very fast database of my emails to search through so finding any old details doesn't take away precious minutes of my busy day.

I'm happy to help anyone who struggles with this. If i find time i might come and add images in to help people along. My next blog will show you how to beat a pesky firewall that keeps your SMTP blocked, this stops you from sending emails vi outlook, by using SSL to tunnel through it. A specific problem for me, but perhaps I'm not alone. Perhaps it will help someone save a couple of hours stitching together the information i did this evening getting it figured out.

Thanks for reading.... sorry it was so long... comments welcome. Other than that, have a nice day and say hey once in a while.