Post by NYPost by VanguardLHMicrosoft is just following the long-time trend of pushing users to a
webmail client. Despite that Microsoft's (and no other) webmail client
comes close to the feature set of MS Outlook (Outlook, not OE), e-mail
providers have growing dropped supporting any local clients using their
service. When called, they'll help with using their webmail client.
They don't waste the time and money to train their help staff on the
multitude of ancient and current local e-mail clients.
It's a shame that the world is going over to webmail because it requires a
web connection to be able to read your historic messages, as does IMAP in a
mail client,
You need to educate yourself about IMAP. There *is* a local copy. I
can see all my retrieved/sync'ed messages in my local client whether I
have an Internet connection or not. No one using an IMAP client
suddenly loses access to their message because they lost the Internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Message_Access_Protocol
IMAP is not a web view of your account. It is not a webmail client. It
is a local e-mail client that has its own local message store that
syncrhonizes with the server (which then synchronizes with any other
IMAP clients that connect to the same account).
IMAP was designed to grant access to a mailbox by /multiple/ clients and
to keep the mailbox synchronized between those clients. If you use only
one e-mail client all the time (i.e., you never use another host, like
you do e-mail at work, home, on vacation, the library, or at a friends
house) then POP is sufficient. POP was designed for one-client access.
You don't need synchronizing amongst multiple e-mail clients because
you're only using one. I use IMAP so I have the same view of my e-mail
from my home desktop PC, my smartphone, at work on their workstations,
at my friend's place using his computer, or while on vacation or
travelling. I don't lose availability of a message just because I'm
somewhere else.
Post by NYObviously you won't be able to send email or receive any *new*
mail in this situation, but it's useful still to be able to refer to a
message that you received a while ago.
An IMAP client can poll just like it would for POP. The only feature
you lose when offline is IMAP's IDLE/PUSH which has the server alert
your client when a new message arrives. Instead of waiting until the
next mail poll by your local e-mail client, the IMAP server can push a
notification to your IMAP client that a new message just arrived. As
with POP, you can be offline with IMAP, read your local copies, and you
connect when you want to check for new messages or to send them.
For one, and ONLY one, e-mail client, there is no advantage of IMAP over
POP. POP: 1 client access. IMAP: multiple client access. IMAP was not
designed for access to an account by just one client. It's probably
been 2 over decades since I did e-mail at only one endpoint.
Also, IMAP is its own backup. With POP using a .pst or other local
database then someone stealing your computer, a fire destroying it, a
hard disk crash, or other hardware failure or loss or even malware means
you lose your local message store. Yes, if you have backups (something
overly rare with the typical user community) then you can restore the
message store. With IMAP, the messages are still on the server. So I
can just connect a new IMAP client and, voila, I have all my messages
again. If a build a new computer, install the OS and apps, all I have
to do to get back to my prior state with IMAP e-mail is connect the
client to the IMAP server. Poof, all my e-mails are there. No having
to bother with restores from backups. I've even deleted accounts and
recreated them and, voila, my messages are already there. I do my own
backups but it is still nice to have the service doing their own
backups, too. IMAP is itself a backup. Everything is still there up on
the server to get back to working.
Post by NYAlso there is too much risk that you can accidentally delete messages during
a tidy-up and then not be able to restore them from any backup that you may
have taken.
So include the .ost file in your backup or whatever is the local IMAP
message store for your e-mail client. IMAP saves *local copies* of your
messages but keeps them in sync to the server (which then keeps other
clients in sync that connect to the same account). You do not need
Internet access to read the local copies. You can backup the local
message store. What did you think all that download time was for when
an IMAP client connected to the server and downloaded new messages?
Post by NYAnd with IMAP if you delete a message on one cllient, it very
often deletes it from the server and therefore from the view seen on another
client (eg you use your desktop as the definitive copy of any messages that
you want to keep long-term, but if all the folders exist on the IMAP server
then if you delete a message when you are using a mobile phone, it's "gone"
from the desktop PC as well because it's gone from the server.
So the result is the separate POP clients getting out of sync. For
those that want to keep their POP clients in sync, the closest they can
do is to configure each POP client to delete the message on the server
when it gets deleted in the client.
When you delete a message (POP or IMAP), the client moves (not deletes)
the message into its Trash or Deleted Items folder. You have not
actually deleted the message. It's still in your message store. Only
when you delete a message in the Trash folder is it permanently deleted
(locally and then on the server after a sync for IMAP). Well, how many
safety nets do you need to prevent you from deleting a file that you
really didn't want to delete?
POP clients also have an option to "delete from server" when you delete
a message in the local message store. Many users enable that option if
not the default. They want to keep the webmail and multiple POP clients
view the same. So POP can do the same thing: you can delete a message
in one client with the result that after the next poll it gets deleted
up on the server, too, and thereby disappear from view in the webmail
client. Other POP clients may still have the old message but then you
have multiple clients with differing messages. To which one do you
wander to retrieve that message you accidentally deleted (TWICE since
the first got *moved* into the Trash folder) in another POP client?
You should be using a different folder than Inbox for archiving old
messages. If you don't delete them using IMAP then obviously they're
still around, and that same archive will be available in each IMAP
client connected to the same e-mail account. You don't end up at a
resort when travelling with your laptop to realize that an archived
message about your reservation and confirmation is way back at home when
the counter rep says they don't have you registered.
If you keep old messages in one POP client but delete them in other POP
clients, the clients get out of sync and you then have to figure out
which one still has the old messages. Nope, not here, try that one,
nope, not there, either, how about here? Since you do backups, I would
think THAT would be your means of recovering an old message that you
deleted (which was not an accidental delete with having to do it TWICE).
Why would you wait until you got to work or to wherever are your other
POP clients to restore that deliberately deleted message?
Post by NYIf webmail or IMAP are all you have, you probably get used to a different
way of working, and know not to delete any messages from any device (phone,
tablet, PC) unless you want to delete them permanently.
Same for POP. Archived messages don't hang around in my Inbox. They
get moved into other folders. It takes twice deleting a message to
permanently delete a message in any local e-mail client whether using
POP or IMAP. I wouldn't bother going to other POP clients to get their
old copy of a message deleted on one host. I'd restore from backups. I
can restore the local message store whether it is POP or IMAP.
POP only understands the concept of a mailbox. There is no folder
support in POP. Typically the mailbox is called Inbox up on the server
and what you see using a webmail client. Say you are using your local
POP client and move a message from your local Inbox folder to your local
Archive folder. Now you're somewhere else and use the webmail client to
your account. Can you see the old message you moved into your Archive
folder in the POP client back at home? Nope. Can you use a POP client
on your laptop while on vacation to look into the Archive folder on your
home desktop? Nope. That message on your local POP client is not
available anywhere else. There is no synchronization. There is no
support for folders.
If POP does everything you need then don't bother with IMAP. Others
want the synchronization, backup, and folder support that IMAP offers.
Some users don't want to use any e-mail protocol: not POP, IMAP, SMTP,
Deltasync, WebDAV, EAS, Exchange, or any of it. They don't want to even
bother with using an e-mail client. For them, webmail clients are what
they want to use.
Post by NYYes, ideally I would upload email "attachments" to my own web space so I
have write access only for myself and anyone has read access via a URL. But
it's tedious, especially when you have to reduce the size (pixel dimensions
and file size) of photos manually in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, whereas
OE, Windows Mail and WLM will do this for you with attachments (OK, the
photo-shrinking algorithm that it uses is pretty dire, but sometimes speed
and convenience is more important than a few JPEG artifacts!)
If you have to reduce the size of files before uploading them, think how
impolite it is to send the originally sized file via e-mail which bloats
the file size by 133%, usually a lot more. What if they don't want the
file? You removed their choice by attaching it to an e-mail. Rare few
are users that configure their e-mail client to thwart retrieval of
e-mails that over some threshold in size.
Post by NYPost by VanguardLHAs to logging in, excuse me but just how are the recipients going to get
your huge e-mail with large file attachment(s) without having to login?
What I mean is that you login to your own webmail or you set your POP client
to login automatically to download your new emails, but then when you
receive an email from WLM that has uploaded its files to MS's cloud storage,
you are prompted to log in to your MS account (which you may not even have
ever created) in order to see those files.
No recipient of mine that received an e-mail from me with a link to a
file uploaded to OneDrive has ever had to create or login into a
OneDrive account. Do you know how to *share* a file in OneDrive?
The recipient gets a link. They click on it in their e-mail *if* they
CHOOSE to get the file. Their web browser loads, a OneDrive page
appears, and then a Save As dialog appear to let them decide where to
save the file. They never have to login. They do NOT need to create a
OneDrive account. Yes, they do need a web browser and Internet access
to get the file from OneDrive, but who doesn't have a web browser
available (they're ubiquitous in every OS) and to get e-mails means they
already have Internet access.
Post by NYMIME attachements are inefficient but they are universal, whereas cloud
storage tends to be rather proprietary and needs you to know the foibles of
the cloud storage that has been used. That's a minor hassle for experienced
people, but it's a nightmare for people who just use their computer as a
tool
And then those recipients wonder why they can no longer get new
messages, even when someone calls or texts them to say a message got
sent, because someone sent such a huge e-mail that it consumed the
recipient's disk quota. No further e-mails can be accepted until the
recipient happens to review their e-mail account (by using a web
browser) to delete the impolite huge e-mail.
Post by NYNewer versions of WLM (those with the ribbon UI) tend to default to
uploading files to cloud storage, with all the problems this causes for the
recipient,
I have not use WLM in quite a while. It has its own newsgroup to
discuss its behavior and usage.
I upload a file to my OneDrive, chare it to create a link, and paste
that in my e-mail. The recipient gets a tiny e-mail, they can CHOOSE to
click on the link to get the file, and they never have to login to
OneDrive. That's because I made the file shared.
Post by NYI'd rather use cloud storage if it was implemented better so any client can
upload at the sending end and download and display automatically as part of
the message at the receiving end.
Probably the files you attach as MIME parts really aren't that big. Try
sending a 4GB ISO file as an attachment. If you managed to send it,
your recipient won't be happy having to wait for that slow download
(file downloads are much faster than e-mail bandwidth per connection to
the server). What is a "large file" to you might differ than what I
perceive as a large file. Although not fixed in stone, my usual cutoff
between attaching a file (or several of them) or linking to it is 20 MB
(total size for all attachments), also the default threshold for Outlook
(https://www.lifewire.com/increase-outlook-attachment-size-limit-1173679).
If I try to attach a bigger file, Outlook prompts that I should instead
insert a link to the file in my e-mail. I don't have any recipients
still using dial-up. If I did, my decision threshold would be a lot
smaller.
