Ugh- why are people still using POP3???

[IronWing]

Because it works.

This.

 

[CMAR606]

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

OMG why Eudora that program is ANCIENT.... And not even being developed anymore.. Ok, I cant be talking I like Eudora :X Secretly shhh don't tell anyone I like the DEE DEE DA DEE! when you get a new email Lol.

Christopher

 

[CMAR606]

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

Also I learned Eudora is easy to corrupt... like lets say your answering an email and boom power goes out your whole .toc file gets screwed and your messages disappear till you find out how to rebuilt that .toc file.. a PITA but I love EU though.

 

[cuafpr]

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

^ this... all you need to know, ask the average office worker what is POP3 and they will probably say its a new energy drink...

 

[Miramonti]

I have never enjoyed using IMAP so I never have for very long.

 

[Dulanic]

Yahoo's lack of imap on Android without using their app was why I finally gave up my yahoo email. Push email is important to me.

 

[MrCassdin]

I'll take a private pop3 provider over a free web based junk like Google or Yahoo! any day.

Back in the day pop3 was a must if you wanted to use a real email client like Outlook (or even Outlook Express). These days most providers that have pop3 also have IMAP. I use IMAP myself.

 

[Printer Bandit]

I use whatever protonmail uses.

 

[Ichinisan]

"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.

Yup. Drives me mad.

[edit]
It's a necro, but I don't care...

 

[Ichinisan]

I have never enjoyed using IMAP so I never have for very long.

Luddite.

What isn't enjoyable about having your messages all in one place so they stay synchronized with all your devices? You can tell which ones you've read, even when you read them from another device. Continue a draft you started on another device. Find a message you sent from another device.

The only "problem" is using an older IMAP client that doesn't move messages to the trash folder. That causes issues with Google-hosted mail. Use Outlook 2010+, Thunderbird, or Windows Live Mail. They work fine.

 

[Ichinisan]

Also I learned Eudora is easy to corrupt... like lets say your answering an email and boom power goes out your whole .toc file gets screwed and your messages disappear till you find out how to rebuilt that .toc file.. a PITA but I love EU though.

How can you stand to use it? You couldn't design a worse user interface if you tried to.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Since my internet connection is not always existent, I prefer being able to download emails to my PC to peruse (or ignore) later/

 

[IronWing]

How can you stand to use it? You couldn't design a worse user interface if you tried to.

In the realm of terrible interfaces Google Mail Enterprise took Eudora behind the woodshed and beat the living crap out of it. Google's ever-changing interface just gets worse and worse. "We decided that buttons were passe. Therefore we hid all functionality behind blank pieces of screen real estate. It's like totally intuitive that you wiggle your mouse around the bottom of the message frame to bring up the text format options. If you don't like it, you're stupid but not to worry, next month's patch will simply remove the option and we'll take care of it for you through predictive formatting. This message is getting awful long. Would you like to load it as a document in Google Drive instead?"

 

[MrDudeMan]

i would shoot myself if i didn't have exchange email. imap is mostly fine, but exchange is still a lot beter. pop3... lol... i actually can't believe people are defending it.

contacts, calendars, and email sync better with exchange than imap. imap still works in this regard, but not as well in my experience. considering how inexpensive an exchange email account is, i don't see any other choice as viable. i know a lot of people aren't interested or too cheap to pay for email, which is fine for them, but i'll never go back. i still have a gmail account, but i don't use it for work related email specifically because it's free. i don't mind if the content is scanned, but the plug can be pulled at any time and there won't be a damn thing i can do about it.

 

[IronWing]

i would shoot myself if i didn't have exchange email. imap is mostly fine, but exchange is still a lot beter. pop3... lol... i actually can't believe people are defending it.

contacts, calendars, and email sync better with exchange than imap. imap still works in this regard, but not as well in my experience. considering how inexpensive an exchange email account is, i don't see any other choice as viable. i know a lot of people aren't interested or too cheap to pay for email, which is fine for them, but i'll never go back. i still have a gmail account, but i don't use it for work related email specifically because it's free. i don't mind if the content is scanned, but the plug can be pulled at any time and there won't be a damn thing i can do about it.

I like Exchange. It is something MS eventually got right. Therefore my employer dropped it in favor of Google's crappy software.

 

[lupi]

see no need for imap, can prune mail via the phone and what I don't delete I download to the one computer I have outlook set up on.

 

[MrDudeMan]

I like Exchange. It is something MS eventually got right. Therefore my employer dropped it in favor of Google's crappy software.

lol. i just switched a few companies to exchange and everyone loves it. lync integration in outlook/exchange is incredibly useful for work purposes.

i love the idea of gmail, but the interface doesn't do it for me. also, the search capability seems to be incredibly bad, which is very ironic. i have an email called "to do: ..." and i can't find it regardless of what i try in the gmail search interface even though i know every single detail about the email. i can only find it in outlook.

 

[Red Squirrel]

How I roll:

Mail fetched from online pop3 server to local mailbox
accessed via imap locally. Nice thing with this is my mail is always on my home network and client configuration is made rather easy as I just point to imap server. No need to backup email as it's already on the server which has raid and backups already.

 

[Oldgamer]

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.

Best an easiest way to explain:

POP3 and IMAP are two different protocols (methods) used to access email. Each has its own advantages.

POP3 downloads email from a server to a single computer, then deletes it from the server. So POP3 is most useful if you want to keep all your email on one computer and check emails only on that computer, and not from any other device.

IMAP is the better option when you need to check your emails from multiple devices, such as a work laptop, a home computer, or a tablet, smartphone, or other mobile device. Tap into your synced (updated) account from any device with IMAP.

Here are the differences between POP3 and IMAP.

POP3 - Post Office Protocol
You can use only one computer to check your email (no other devices)
Your mails are stored on the computer that you use
Sent mail is stored locally on your PC, not on a mail server

IMAP - Internet Messaging Access Protocol
You can use multiple computers and devices to check your email
Your mails are stored on the server
Sent mail stays on the server so you can see it from any device.

Link to site with the info above

They both have certain advantages depending on how you use your email and what devices.

 

[sourceninja]

The main reasons POP was popular was because ISP's were not equipped to store your email. We needed you to delete that shit.

Honestly now, I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone isn't using gmail, outlook.com, yahoo or some other 'infinite' mail provider with a better interface, better spam filtering, and full on active sync support.

When i was doing tech support for a local ISP in 1996 almost half of my phone calls had to do with customers being pop locked. Their modem would drop the connection, the lock file would remain and they couldn't get their email. It was a PITA.

Today, I have my mail on 3-4 devices all synced, all real time, why the fuck would I ever want anything less?

 

[Ichinisan]

lol. i just switched a few companies to exchange and everyone loves it. lync integration in outlook/exchange is incredibly useful for work purposes.

i love the idea of gmail, but the interface doesn't do it for me. also, the search capability seems to be incredibly bad, which is very ironic. i have an email called "to do: ..." and i can't find it regardless of what i try in the gmail search interface even though i know every single detail about the email. i can only find it in outlook.

Put "to do" in quotes. If you know for sure that it's in the subject, you can be specific: subject:"to do"

Search is one of the best things about Gmail.

before:XXXX-XX-XX fromxxx OR ]xxx@xxx.xxx) subject"xxx xxx" OR xxxxx) -subject:xxxxx has:attachment

(the "-" means "exclude")

 

[Ichinisan]

The main reasons POP was popular was because ISP's were not equipped to store your email. We needed you to delete that shit.

Honestly now, I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone isn't using gmail, outlook.com, yahoo or some other 'infinite' mail provider with a better interface, better spam filtering, and full on active sync support.

When i was doing tech support for a local ISP in 1996 almost half of my phone calls had to do with customers being pop locked. Their modem would drop the connection, the lock file would remain and they couldn't get their email. It was a PITA.

Today, I have my mail on 3-4 devices all synced, all real time, why the fuck would I ever want anything less?

It was always horrible when people thought they could manage it fine with the "leave message on server" work-around. That's not a standard part of the POP protocol and some servers (Google) ignore it. When it does work, it's up to the mail client to keep track of which messages it has already downloaded. A slight tweak to the mail account settings often results in users accidentally re-downloading thousands of duplicate messages that had accumulated for years.

POP is horrible.

 

[BUTCH1]

Best an easiest way to explain:

POP3 and IMAP are two different protocols (methods) used to access email. Each has its own advantages.

POP3 downloads email from a server to a single computer, then deletes it from the server. So POP3 is most useful if you want to keep all your email on one computer and check emails only on that computer, and not from any other device.

IMAP is the better option when you need to check your emails from multiple devices, such as a work laptop, a home computer, or a tablet, smartphone, or other mobile device. Tap into your synced (updated) account from any device with IMAP.

Here are the differences between POP3 and IMAP.

POP3 - Post Office Protocol
You can use only one computer to check your email (no other devices)
Your mails are stored on the computer that you use
Sent mail is stored locally on your PC, not on a mail server

IMAP - Internet Messaging Access Protocol
You can use multiple computers and devices to check your email
Your mails are stored on the server
Sent mail stays on the server so you can see it from any device.

Link to site with the info above

They both have certain advantages depending on how you use your email and what devices.

I still use POP3 because earthlink does not allow IMAP so no choice here. Another good site explaining the differences, http://www.pop2imap.com/

 

[MrDudeMan]

Put "to do" in quotes. If you know for sure that it's in the subject, you can be specific: subject:"to do"

Search is one of the best things about Gmail.

before:XXXX-XX-XX fromxxx OR ]xxx@xxx.xxx) subject"xxx xxx" OR xxxxx) -subject:xxxxx has:attachment

(the "-" means "exclude")

If you're going to try to explain the advanced search interface to someone, you may as well link to the actual FAQ. I can be staring at the email in outlook using any and every piece of metadata and the gmail search interface will not find the email. Search in gmail is absolutely horrible and I'm not even close to the only person who feels this way. There's a thread with over 10,000 replies on the google forums specifically about this issue. Gmail search is exact string match only, which is flipping ridiculous.

 

[MtnMan]

Because I want to, and why the fuck to you care?