syncying local email between windows 7 boxes

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Is there an app that can sync local email programs between computers?

 

[corkyg]

You can opt to leave mail on the POP server and then download it to different computers. That is why I keep good old Eudora Pro around. It is easy to copy email folders from one machine to another.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Ah good ole Eudora. I remember working with that early 2000 when I was a techie at my state college.

Thanks for the reply! 🙂

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I leave email on the POP server for about two weeks and then have multiple installations of Thunderbird setup to retrieve. Works great.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Hmm. I've used one local program to basically save a history of my emails for referencing.. I hate to use a webmail program. What is the best these days? One that isn't tied with an internet service provider..

 

[owensdj]

If you can get the email using an IMAP rather than POP system it works much better for accessing from multiple machines. The messages stay on the email server with IMAP.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

What other local programs use IMAP?

 

[Charlie98]

I leave email on the POP server for about two weeks and then have multiple installations of Thunderbird setup to retrieve. Works great.

That's what I do as well... I can get mail across 4 different computers (using Outlook'03 and Postbox Express) and my phone... kind of a pain on the phone, but I would rather have than have not.

 

[code65536]

Pretty much everything can use IMAP.

Windows Live Mail and Outlook from Microsoft.

Thunderbird and its offspring, Eudora OSE and Postbox.

Plus every other halfway-decent mail client--IMAP is almost as old as POP, after all.

POP is just silly now that mail servers have gobs of storage, and I haven't used it in aeons. I use IMAP, and every computer downloads a copy of every message so that I have offline access and a backup if something ever happens to the server. And everything is synced between the server and every computer, including folder structures and organization. Seriously, stop using POP--it's antiquated in this day and age.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Pretty much everything can use IMAP.

Windows Live Mail and Outlook from Microsoft.

Thunderbird and its offspring, Eudora OSE and Postbox.

Plus every other halfway-decent mail client--IMAP is almost as old as POP, after all.

POP is just silly now that mail servers have gobs of storage, and I haven't used it in aeons. I use IMAP, and every computer downloads a copy of every message so that I have offline access and a backup if something ever happens to the server. And everything is synced between the server and every computer, including folder structures and organization. Seriously, stop using POP--it's antiquated in this day and age.

I use Windows Live Mail. Where does it ask if I want to use IMAP? I sort of started going through the process of setting up another email address just to see if it offered IMAP and I didn't get to that option in the setup..

Can POP be converted to IMAP or do I have to through the entire setup of a new email address?

 

[Charlie98]

Pretty much everything can use IMAP.

Not to hijack B/529's thread, but what is the advantage to IMAP over POP? I never gave it much thought...

Can POP be converted to IMAP or do I have to through the entire setup of a new email address?

...and would it affect already downloaded email?

 

[code65536]

Not to hijack B/529's thread, but what is the advantage to IMAP over POP? I never gave it much thought...

POP is just a protocol for downloading messages from a server. That's all it does. Most people who use POP use their local machine as their main mail repository and organize the mail locally.

IMAP takes a very different approach to mail. With IMAP, all your mail is stored and organized on the server. So IMAP has concepts like folders and such. The data stored locally is really just a cache. Of course, you can make it so that every single message is cached locally, so that you can access your e-mail while offline and so that your local cache is effectively a mirror backup in case the server implodes, but at the end of the day, it's just a cache, and the copy on the server is the primary, authoritative copy.

The main benefit of IMAP is that, because everything is stored on the server, the state of your e-mail is consistent no matter how you access your e-mail. For example, I access my Gmail account via IMAP (when using my own computer), webmail (when I need to use some of Gmail's more powerful search tools or when I'm using someone else's computer), and Android phone. When I move a message from my inbox to a folder using my IMAP client, this change is reflected in both webmail and the phone app. When a message is starred in the phone app, it's also starred in webmail and flagged in my IMAP client. And when I read a message in webmail, the message is marked as read in the phone and in the IMAP client. If I delete a message from gmail.com, it will also be deleted from the IMAP clients on every one of my computers the next time they sync with the server.

Back in the old days when people had 5MB mailboxes, IMAP didn't make a whole lot of sense--you need to keep the server clear, and your local PC with its abundant storage was the best place to keep years worth of correspondence, so that's why POP3 dominated the 90's. But now that we're in the age of 25GB e-mail (and also accessing e-mail in a lot of different ways from a variety of devices), keeping everything stored centrally on the server makes a lot more sense, and it's why I no longer use POP3 and use IMAP exclusively.

...and would it affect already downloaded email?

It depends. Was the downloaded mail removed from the server? If so, then you'll need to re-upload your mail to the server.

I use Windows Live Mail. Where does it ask if I want to use IMAP? I sort of started going through the process of setting up another email address just to see if it offered IMAP and I didn't get to that option in the setup.

In the mail setup in Windows Live Mail, there should be a checkbox or some other thing that lets you manually configure the mail server, and there you can punch in the IMAP server settings. Also, recent versions of WLM will recognize that a @gmail.com address belongs to Gmail and will set that up automatically for IMAP. For other services, you'll need to make sure that your mail provider supports IMAP and then obtain the server settings from the provider.

Can POP be converted to IMAP or do I have to through the entire setup of a new email address?

If your e-mail provider supports IMAP, you can just switch to it by disabling the POP3 profile in your e-mail client and creating a new IMAP profile to access your account via IMAP. And if desired, you can then upload e-mails from your POP3 folders back onto the server via IMAP if they had been previously deleted from the server.

If your e-mail provider doesn't support IMAP, then you'll need to change to one that does, like Gmail.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

You are ignoring the fact that IMAP is storing the email on the server that is in the hands of someone else. Personally, and maybe this is a little paranoid, but I'd much rather delete my email from the ISP/hosting service servers than leave it there.

In this day and age, if someone wants to break into my home and hack my PC locally then so be it. But I am tending to believe that someone hacking a commercial entity is more likely to take place.

I also do not care to leave financial information (online sales transactions sent by email) and the like stored on 3rd party servers waiting for My Hacky to come along and collect.

This isn't to suggest that I do not use IMAP. I only use IMAP for free email services like Gmail, which I've used less and less as the years have gone by.

 

[debian0001]

You are ignoring the fact that IMAP is storing the email on the server that is in the hands of someone else. Personally, and maybe this is a little paranoid, but I'd much rather delete my email from the ISP/hosting service servers than leave it there.

In this day and age, if someone wants to break into my home and hack my PC locally then so be it. But I am tending to believe that someone hacking a commercial entity is more likely to take place.

I also do not care to leave financial information (online sales transactions sent by email) and the like stored on 3rd party servers waiting for My Hacky to come along and collect.

This isn't to suggest that I do not use IMAP. I only use IMAP for free email services like Gmail, which I've used less and less as the years have gone by.

They most likely have the data backed up and on retention of some sort.

 

[Charlie98]

Code, thank you for that explanation! Learn something new every day...

You are ignoring the fact that IMAP is storing the email on the server that is in the hands of someone else. Personally, and maybe this is a little paranoid, but I'd much rather delete my email from the ISP/hosting service servers than leave it there.

I would tend to agree. I don't use 'cloud' anything, and I would prefer backing up and storing my mail locally (as I do, for my business.)

 

[code65536]

You are ignoring the fact that IMAP is storing the email on the server that is in the hands of someone else. Personally, and maybe this is a little paranoid, but I'd much rather delete my email from the ISP/hosting service servers than leave it there.

It's far more likely that I get burglarized or my laptop is stolen than it is for someone to break into Google.

And yes, Google does scan my e-mails. They're upfront about that. It's done by machines and not by people. And they've worked very hard to push back, legally and legislatively, against state intrusions of privacy.

I know it's not a particularly popular stance to take, but I do trust Google. Both in the sense that Google security is impregnable (as long as someone doesn't guess/steal my Google password, but that would be my fault if that happens) and in the sense that they will do more than most other e-mail providers to defend my data against three-lettered organizations.

But if you really, really don't like third parties having a copy of your e-mail, you could set up your own IMAP server. But keep in mind that the other party in the e-mail could still retain a copy of the message. And some services retain/archive/cache e-mails that pass through them. So deleting them off your ISP's mail server is no guarantee that your privacy is protected--if you really care that much, you should just encrypt your correspondences (S/MIME or GPG).