4. IMAP Misconceptions

“Sorry, we don’t serve POP. But I can make you a soda, or perhaps a nice milkshake.”
“Sorry, we don’t serve POP. But I can make you a soda, or perhaps a nice milkshake.”

In this chapter, I want to examine a handful of common misconceptions about IMAP, a popular protocol for retrieving email from a server. IMAP stands for… well, thereby hangs the first tale. IMAP’s inventor, Mark Crispin (who, sadly, died in December 2012), called the first version of his creation Interim Mail Access Protocol. Versions 2, 3, and 2bis were referred to as Interactive Mail Access Protocol, and version 4—what’s in use today—is officially Internet Message Access Protocol. Although many Web sites claim that the acronym once ...

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