Ugh- why are people still using POP3???

[Fritzo]

"Hi, my email keeps getting stuck while downloading a 25 MB attachment"
"Hi, I'm fine with deleting 5 copies of the same email at different locations."
"Hi, I'm used to not having the same sent items in my folders on my phone/computer/at home/etc"
"Hi, I leave a copy of the messages on the server so I can't empty my mailbox without logging into webmail."
"Hi, I'm from 2001 when people had 10MB mailboxes and were forced to POP messages to keep them empty."

Getting frustrated with people today Freakin' get with the 21st century and start using IMAP or Exchange or equivalent.

I'm mad bro.

 

[darkewaffle]

Because if you tell most people they're using POP3 email they probably think of popcorn or bubbles.

 

[Mixolydian]

People are idiots.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

POP3 rules, and I've never had problems.

 

[lxskllr]

POP can be useful. I've switched to IMAP, but there isn't a lot of difference between them in my usage.

 

[CPA]

99% of email users don't have a clue of what POP3 is.

 

[Ben90]

"Hi, I'm from the 1800's when typewriters jammed and QWERTY allowed us to type faster."

Better rant.

 

[MrColin]

I was trying to explain the advantages of IMAP over POP3 to a boss of mine (who is widely regarded as having scary level high intelligence in his own field) and he just sort of glazed over and said I might as well be speaking Portugese.

 

[Texashiker]

Getting frustrated with people today Freakin' get with the 21st century and start using IMAP or Exchange or equivalent.

Want to see an email server crash?

Install exchange and add 10,000 users.

Why do providers user pop3? Because it works.

 

[homercles337]

I have never, ever used POP. Even 15 years ago it seemed like a colossally stupid thing. IMAP is all i have ever used.

 

[Fritzo]

Want to see an email server crash?

Install exchange and add 10,000 users.

Why do providers user pop3? Because it works.

If you have that many users you usually have a cluster, so if there is an outage it doesn't take out everyone.

 

[Texashiker]

If you have that many users you usually have a cluster, so if there is an outage it doesn't take out everyone.

Its not just hardware failures, its also the way exchange is designed.

The last time I had experience with exchange was in 2002, so I hope a lot has changed.

Every couple of weeks the exchange database would get corrupted and had to be restored from backup. We had somewhere around 12,000 cable modem subscribers and probably about 50,000 email addresses.

We switched to a Dell server with Red Hat and that fixed the email server issues.

Web based email is nice, very nice. But I also understand why ISPs offer POP3. Most of the smaller ISPs do not want to pay people to maintain an IMAP server. Just tell the customer to sign up a gmail or yahoo.

 

[Fritzo]

Its not just hardware failures, its also the way exchange is designed.

The last time I had experience with exchange was in 2002, so I hope a lot has changed.

Every couple of weeks the exchange database would get corrupted and had to be restored from backup. We had somewhere around 12,000 cable modem subscribers and probably about 50,000 email addresses.

We switched to a Dell server with Red Hat and that fixed the email server issues.

Web based email is nice, very nice. But I also understand why ISPs offer POP3. Most of the smaller ISPs do not want to pay people to maintain an IMAP server. Just tell the customer to sign up a gmail or yahoo.

Most every mailserver since 2005 has had IMAP built in. It's just a matter of using it. Exchange 2007+ has fixed a lot of those old issues, but even better now is Google Apps for Business. No servers to run, 25GB mailboxes, a lot more functionality, and its cheaper in the long run.

I am just demanding that everyone stop using POP. I wonder how many legit messages are sitting in POP users spam folders because they don't go out to webmail and check them.

 

[Vic Vega]

No problem with POP3 if it's what you need. I have Outlook 2007 setup at my mother's house and it uses POP3 to pull her email. There's absolutely zero need to use iMAP and store her email on the server. She only has a single computer and only gets email on that computer. Believe it or not that's still a LOT of users.

 

[webdave]

No problem with POP3 if it's what you need. I have Outlook 2007 setup at my mother's house and it uses POP3 to pull her email. There's absolutely zero need to use iMAP and store her email on the server. She only has a single computer and only gets email on that computer. Believe it or not that's still a LOT of users.

Are you backing up her local email store? One of the benefits of IMAP is everything is backed up on the server as well if your drive dies.

 

[Fritzo]

No problem with POP3 if it's what you need. I have Outlook 2007 setup at my mother's house and it uses POP3 to pull her email. There's absolutely zero need to use iMAP and store her email on the server. She only has a single computer and only gets email on that computer. Believe it or not that's still a LOT of users.

So what happens when she gets a new computer? Instead of just setting up Outlook again, you have to pull all of her mail in from a backup.

 

[Texashiker]

So what happens when she gets a new computer? Instead of just setting up Outlook again, you have to pull all of her mail in from a backup.

Email client - settings - never delete emails from server

I usually set my email client to delete the emails off the server after something like 45 days.

 

[Vic Vega]

So what happens when she gets a new computer? Instead of just setting up Outlook again, you have to pull all of her mail in from a backup.

Uhhh, it's not complicated. It's called a PST which lives in a pair of mirrored HDs - all her incoming email goes here (all 3 messages a MONTH). Should there be a "new computer" or HD failure of the boot/application drive you simply do this in Outlook.

File.
Open.
Outlook Data File.

Wow, that was hard.

POP3 has never been real popular, especially with all the free email services, even back in the 90s. People want things done for them. No problem.

 

[JimKiler]

"Hi, my email keeps getting stuck while downloading a 25 MB attachment"
"Hi, I'm fine with deleting 5 copies of the same email at different locations."
"Hi, I'm used to not having the same sent items in my folders on my phone/computer/at home/etc"
"Hi, I leave a copy of the messages on the server so I can't empty my mailbox without logging into webmail."
"Hi, I'm from 2001 when people had 10MB mailboxes and were forced to POP messages to keep them empty."

Getting frustrated with people today Freakin' get with the 21st century and start using IMAP or Exchange or equivalent.

I'm mad bro.

Are you referencing POP3 from a business or consumer standpoint? I assume business since most consumers use the cloud to get their emails.

 

[ViviTheMage]

POP can be useful. I've switched to IMAP, but there isn't a lot of difference between them in my usage.

This.

Some people have an actual need for POP, and prefer emails to not be on the server.

I like IMAP, duplicates and a 'backup'!

 

[Eos]

I have an acct setup specifically for a large volume of email, and it's POP3. Read, delete, read, delete. It seems to "move" faster than my IMAP accounts.

 

[Vic Vega]

It will move faster based on the cacheing settings of your client. If your client only caches say 10 messages it's loading everything else from the server every time you select a folder. POP3 is all local, all the time after the download so it's much faster.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

<-- Still using Eudora 7 and POP3 for most of my mailboxes. How's that for retro

 

[sportage]

I was trying to explain the advantages of IMAP over POP3 to a boss of mine (who is widely regarded as having scary level high intelligence in his own field) and he just sort of glazed over and said I might as well be speaking Portugese.

Maybe he only speaks Portuguese?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I use pop3 secure on my online server. My local home server uses fetchmail to grab it every 5 minutes, runs it through vigorous spam filters (home cpu power is cheaper than online cpu power) then dumps it into the appropriate imap mailbox. On my workstation I use thunderbird to view it.

Been using this system for at least 10 years, and it's been rock solid. One of the mailboxes is even setup to auto post news to my site iceteks.com. It was kinda funny at first as it did not take into account spam and started spamming up viagra emails that happen to be readable by the parser. That's now something that's taken into account.